QUARK DRUNKENLY reached across the counter of his bar on the Promenade and his gold-pressed-latinum sleevebinder caught the edge of the curved, leather-wrapped flagon of Saurian brandy.
Vintage Saurian brandy. 2215. One hundred bars apiece.
Behind the counter, by the sink, Rom watched in horror as the costly flagon rocked back and forth. Rushing forward, he slipped on the filthy floor and vainly stretched out the gnarled fingers of his injured hand full-length until his knuckles popped and shocks of pain skipped along his arm. But the instant before he could make contact with it, the flagon tipped over and shattered. The suddenly worthless amber-gold liquor swept across the bartop like a miniature tidal wave, taking with it what little remained of Rom’s dreams.
Rom groaned as Quark reared back and cried out grandly, “Put it on my tab!” And then, whooping with laughter, he fell into his companion’s arms.
“Oh, Quarky,” Leeta giggled.
Rom stared in open-mouthed, abject despair as the beautiful dabo girl who had once been his wife pulled “Quarky” closer, then slowly circled his lobe with a single suggestive finger as she whispered something unintelligible that made Rom’s brother giggle and lick his lips appreciatively.
“B-but,” Rom stammered, “y-you never pay your tab, brother.”
Quark merely grinned at him. “You were always telling me you could run this place better than I ever could. Here’s your chance to prove it.”
Just then, in the far corner of the bar’s main floor, two outraged Klingons tossed a flailing, screaming Bolian through the air to land headfirst on the dabo table which promptly collapsed, the appalling damage clearly beyond repair.
Quark sniggered as he made a mock grimace. “Ooo, there go your dabo profits for the month. Ouch.” Then he blew a farewell kiss to Rom as he left with Leeta hanging on his arm, heartlessly taking her up to the holosuites as he did every night, to enjoy the holocylinder for Risian Ear Clinic—The Jamaharon Continues. That had once been Rom’s and Leeta’s favorite, too.
Mournfully watching Leeta leave without him, Rom felt his chest ache almost as painfully as the deep cracks that furrowed the skin of his hands—the cracks that never healed anymore. Because he was forced to wash the dishes in scalding water every night now. Because he no longer had time to repair the sonic sterilizers.
“Hey! Ferengoid! Some service over here!”
A table of rowdy Nausicaans hurled their empty glasses at him—five at a half-slip each. One even struck Rom’s bandaged ear where he had lost a lobe in the unfortunate altercation with Grand Nagus Nog.
“NOW!” the Nausicaans screeched, fangs nastily clicking to emphasize their threat.
Rom lurched forward to dab up what he could of the Saurian brandy with his already stained jacket, then quickly began pouring shots of steaming bile wine as more and more customers shouted out for immediate service.
But in the entire bar, there was only Rom to serve them. All the others who had once worked for Quark had walked out on strike, demanding such high wages that every day Rom bitterly wished he had never organized the union in the first place.
Even thinking about the union, Rom felt his hands tremble and he spilled more bile wine than he poured into the glasses, guaranteeing there would be no profit on this transaction. Even worse, there was no profit on any of the transactions he made these days, and his debt was growing faster than a black hole.
Then Rom jumped as the glasses on the bartop began to rattle rhythmically. Nervously, he looked up to see his absolute best customer—Morn—pounding his tankard, insisting on another round. Now!
Rom picked up a jug of draft Romulan ale. “H-how’s it going, Morn? H-how’re the brothers and, uh, sisters?” Morn had seventeen siblings in all. The question was a surefire conversation starter with the big guy. He usually went on for hours, consuming high-markup beverages all the while.
But these days, not even Morn was speaking to Rom. He simply sat in unnerving silence, as if he didn’t have a word to say.
“I’m … I’m sorry!” Rom blurted, because in truth he was sorry for everything. He practically upended the jug into Morn’s tankard, then winced as the ale’s pale blue foam promptly bubbled upward and cascaded onto the bartop.
Morn’s small dark eyes narrowed as he growled at Rom.
Rom shrank back, dropping the jug of draft on the counter. “S-sorry, sorry, sorry.” The jug spun around in the foam and then slid off the counter, exploding spectacularly as it hit the floor beside Morn’s feet.
Rom’s voice rose high in a squeal. “Uh, I’ll … I’ll get you a bottle of vintage ale, all right? No bubbles?”
Morn growled again. Louder. Meaner.
“And on the house!” Rom squeaked, then rushed back to the replicator because dirty plates and platters were now raining down from the second-floor railing. The impatient Tellarites on the upper level were on a snorting, grunting rampage for more tribble pie.
“What kind of hell is this?” Dukat asked. Rom was so startled, he misentered the last digit of the tribble-pie code and then cringed as a hundred-count of brain-stuffed ravioli sprayed out from the mouth of the replicator. The filthy mess was an illegal dish his brother Quark had programmed years ago when a contingent of Medusan navigators had been onboard. The unsettling eating habits of the noncorporeal life-forms were a closely held secret known only to the top levels of Starfleet and a few select suppliers in the hospitality services. When Captain Sisko found out about the contents of that ravioli, Rom knew for a certainty he’d lose Quark’s lease on the station. He was always losing Quark’s lease.
“And what is that disgusting smell?” Dukat asked.
Rom’s boots squished as he trudged through the mound of replicated pasta and Vulcan brain tissue that now covered the deck behind the bar. There were holes in the soles of his boots, so the body-temperature mass slurped up horribly between his toes.
“Uh, would you like some kanar?” Rom asked miserably. Then he blinked in confusion at the Cardassian.
Dukat was out of uniform. He was wearing what seemed to be the robes of a Bajoran religious order. And his hair was white, his face deeply etched.
“Uh, Gul Dukat … are—are you feeling all right?” Rom asked, peering at him more closely. It was as if the Cardassian had suddenly aged a quarter century or more.
Dukat looked around the chaos of the bar. More fights were breaking out. Dishes and furniture were being destroyed at an accelerating rate. A group of Cardassian soldiers had just won their eighth consecutive dabo at the table that no longer seemed to be in pieces. And even more impossible, Quark and Leeta were locked in a seamless, impassioned embrace at a tiny table off to one corner.
“How is this different?” Dukat asked.
“Uh, different from what?” Rom couldn’t be sure, but for a moment it seemed Dukat’s eyes had glowed red.
“From the way it used to be. When all this was real.”
Rom stared at the gul. His eyes were glowing red.
“This is real … isn’t it?” But even as Rom said those words, there was something in Dukat’s eerie eyes that made him doubt them.
Dukat held out his hand. “If you come with me now, I promise that when you return to … this realm, you shall be in whatever passes for Ferengi heaven, not this hell.”
“I … don’t understand,” Rom said. He looked past Dukat and goggled at what he saw and heard. The crashes and screams of the bar’s mayhem were rapidly fading. A Bolian was suspended, midair, about to crash headfirst into Quark’s perfectly intact dabo table. All the other customers in the bar were similarly frozen in place, including … Gul Dukat? Younger, in uniform, treating those at his table to the most expensive kanar on the menu, just as he always did at this time of night, telling Rom to bill it to a Cardassian trade mission that had gone out of business years ago.
Rom wanted to ask how there could be two Dukats in his brother’s bar, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to say a single word to break the spell the bar was under. For the first time in … in centuries, in millennia, it seemed to Rom, the place was blissfully quiet.
“You don’t have to understand anything,” Dukat said. “Just take my hand, and promise to serve me.”
Rom stared at that hand, hesitant.
“Rom,” Dukat said, “really. How much worse could your life get?”
Rom considered the question seriously. “It … it couldn’t. This is the worst it’s ever been.”
Dukat nodded once, held his hand higher. “So, what do you say?”
“I, uh, promise to serve you?” Then Rom took hold of that cold gray hand and at once—
—arose from the deck in the Boreth, in the engine room, hand in hand with Dukat.
Rom gazed around him in confusion, stared down at his hands, no longer cracked and gnarled. He lifted his one free hand, felt for his lost lobe, and found it intact. He looked up at Dukat, at last remembering what had happened.
“The universe?” he asked weakly.
“This fever called living is over at last,” Dukat intoned. “There is no more universe.”
“Then how …” Rom swallowed hard as he made his realization. “We’re in the wormhole, aren’t we?”
“Where else is there?” Dukat suddenly squeezed Rom’s hand hard enough that Rom was sure he heard his own bones grate as the Cardassian hauled him into the air with one hand.
“And when I was in the bar?” Rom gasped.
Dukat’s eyes flared with red energy as he excruciatingly tightened his grip on Rom’s hand. “You were being toyed with,” the Cardassian said. “Punished for no other reason than to satisfy those driven mad by their own punishment.”
“Wh-who?” Rom hoped he wouldn’t faint from the pain before he heard Dukat’s answer.
“Chief O’Brien needs you on the bridge,” Dukat said abruptly, dropping Rom to the floor. “If I were you, I’d do what he says. Otherwise …”
Rom nodded vigorously as he swayed on his feet and clutched his throbbing hand. He didn’t want to go back to the bar. He would do anything to avoid that. He looked around the vast engineering section of the advanced-technology Klingon ship. “Uh, where is the bridge?”
Dukat dragged him toward the doors, never letting go.
Not that there was anyplace left for Rom to run to.
At the engineering station on the bridge of the Boreth, surrounded by the motionless bodies of the other temporal refugees, O’Brien stared at the displays on his sensor screens and tried to make sense of them.
At the least complex level of interpretation, there was little to question in the results he had obtained.
Just as the main viewer made clear, it was Deep Space 9—and not Empok Nor—which was within the wormhole environment in some sort of proximity to the Boreth. O’Brien could only conclude that instead of being gravitationally crushed by the opening of the red wormhole, the station had, instead, been swallowed by it. Judging from the fact that all its docking arms had been restored, Weyoun had apparently had repair crews in here to restore it.
In the same indistinct fashion, O’Brien could see that the sensors confirmed that the Defiant was also here, and also apparently without major damage.
But none of that solved O’Brien’s key problem: In this realm, what did the term “here” mean anymore?
He touched a control that would give him access to the Boreth’s external communications array. As the comm keypads appeared on his board, he glanced again at the bridge’s main doors. Dukat had been gone for ten minutes and there was no way to be sure how much longer O’Brien would have to work undisturbed. But if ever a situation called for taking a chance …
He set the communications transmit options to full subspace spread, no encryption, maximum power. “O’Brien to Defiant. O’Brien to Defiant. Come in, anyone.” Then he put the message on automatic repeat and watched as the status lights showed it being transmitted up and down the subspace spectrum.
But there was no reply. In fact, the feedback sensors indicated that the message had not even been successfully sent.
O’Brien blew out his breath and called up a sensor diagnostic subroutine. And even allowing for the extra time it took to translate the controls and readings from their odd mixture of Bajoran and Klingon technical glyphs, it took less than thirty seconds to see what the problem was.
The message had not been transmitted because there was no subspace through which it could travel. The local environment was the equivalent of a subspace vacuum.
“Impossible,” O’Brien muttered to himself. “We used to transmit subspace messages through the wormhole. We … oh.” The chief engineer paused as he realized that the subspace environment that had allowed messages to be transmitted through the Bajoran wormhole was an artifact from the normal space-time metric which existed at each end of the wormhole.
But there were no ends here. Normal space-time no longer existed. The Boreth, Deep Space 9, and the Defiant were no longer in a wormhole tunnel, they were within a wormhole pocket. Though how can you have a wormhole if there’s nothing for that hole to pass through?
Rather than torture himself over trying to answer the maddening question, O’Brien decided then and there to accept the fact that he missed Dax. He could always count on her to come up with an equation or two to help give him a direction for his more practical, handson approaches to various problems.
But for this problem, without Dax, he was reduced to tapping his fingers at the side of the console, trying to think of what to do next. Then the ship trembled and the deck pitched as if the Boreth were an ancient ship at sea.
For whatever reason, the movement lasted only a moment. The lights didn’t even flicker.
In fact, the only aftereffect the chief engineer could note was that the background of red energy and glowing verteron strings and nodes against which DS9 and, most of the time, the Defiant had been hung had changed.
Now it was blue. The same rippling, icy translucence that the chief engineer remembered from his trips through the first Bajoran wormhole.
O’Brien checked his sensor readings of the Boreth’s environment again but saw no appreciable change resulting from the switchover from red to blue. But the fact that color could change out there made him think of simple, ordinary photons. Unlike subspace transmissions which had to travel through a subspace medium as sound traveled through air, electromagnetic signals could propagate through a vacuum. O’Brien smiled in relief as he ran through a set of seldomused Klingon communications settings until he found what he was looking for.
Radio.
The primary reason a ship like the Boreth even had that capability was in the event contact was made with an emergent, pre-warp technological culture. But in this case, primitive radio was just what he needed to conquer the unfathomable conditions of the wormhole pocket.
With a series of quick commands, O’Brien redirected his spoken message so it was relayed over the simple electromagnetic spectrum. He even adjusted the Boreth’s transmitter arrays so that the message was aimed at the Defiant.
But, frustratingly, even though the feedback indicators showed that this time the message was indeed being transmitted, there was still no response.
O’Brien sighed, turned his attention to Deep Space 9. Under normal conditions, the station constantly transmitted automated navigational signals in a variety of energy spectrums, even radio. If he could measure how those signals were being transmitted from the station to the Boreth, perhaps get an idea of what kind of interference might be at work in here, he might be able to make adjustments to his own transmission to the Defiant.
He checked the bridge doors again. Still no sign of Dukat. “Keep ’im busy, Rom,” O’Brien said under his breath. Then he scanned all frequencies he knew the station would be transmitting on.
Nothing.
“Bloody hell,” O’Brien said. He looked at the viewer. Deep Space 9 took up the middle quarter. He knew it had power because he could see the glow of its fusion reactors and its running lights were … “Wait a minute.” Tapping a finger each time the station’s hazard-warning lights blinked on and off, O’Brien started to count off seconds out loud like a first-year engineering student. “One millicochrane … two millicochrane … three millicochrane … that’s it!”
The hazard lights atop each docking arm were cycling on and off too slowly. “It’s in a different temporal frame of reference!”
He ran a quick series of calculations based on how fast the lights should be blinking versus how fast they actually were. The offset was approximately twenty-eight percent. Fortunately, Starfleet encountered enough antique space probes traveling at sublight, relativistic speeds that any junior engineer could handle the Hawking transformations necessary to bring timeshifted communications into synch. The realignment of the Boreth’s Klingon communications array took less than a minute.
O’Brien listened again, then smiled in triumph as familiar patterns of automated acquisition signals beeped over the bridge speakers.
“Ah, I’ve missed you, too,” he said wistfully. Then he entered the transposition code that would translate the beeps into Federationstandard alphanumerics.
At that, his display screen changed to show three message windows. One was for DS9’s Starfleet identification codes. One was for the codes required for in-system use by the Bajoran Transportation Commission. And the final one was a basic Cardassian location signal. One that Starfleet had elected to keep in operation for the benefit of any ships or automated probes that might have left the Bajoran system before the Cardassians withdrew and that might someday return to a different political situation.
But O’Brien’s focus was on the Starfleet codes. These included time-alignment data, navigational positioning updates, and, of course, like any other Starfleet installation, local stardate calculations. He made some final adjustments in the selectivity of the Boreth’s electromagnetic receivers, then began working out his strategy for applying what he had learned to his next attempt to raise the Defiant.
As a final check of his calculations, he also applied the same adjustments to the radio channel on which the stardate information was being transmitted.
And then he sat back in shock, “No …”
The stardate was wrong.
That wasn’t Deep Space 9 that faced the Boreth.
It was Deep Space 9 as it had existed on stardate 51889.4. Twenty-five years ago.
After having given up all hope of ever escaping his future, Chief Miles O’Brien found himself looking through a window into his past. And the first thought to burn through his engineer’s mind was: If light particles can pass through that window, then so can I.
But before he could do anything about it, the bridge doors slipped open, and Dukat, red eyes ablaze, swept in, towing a baffled-looking Rom.
O’Brien erased his communications screens.
This wasn’t the time, nonlinear or otherwise.
But soon it would be, and with that realization, hope returned to him.
Escape was possible.