LIKE A LIVING current of blood, Odo propelled himself through the tiyerta nok, what the Cardassians called the lifeflow of iron—the arteries of the machine.
But to Odo, they were DS9’s complex, interwoven network of Jefferies tubes, air conduits, and even Quark’s smugglers’ passageways—a gift of the Obsidian Order.
Faster than a security team on turbolifts, the changeling unerringly flowed along those hidden paths through the vast station, their unrecorded layouts long memorized, a simple matter for someone who could effortlessly recall the three-dimensional molecular structure of virtually every solid object he had ever studied.
From the intersection where he had realized what was about to happen to the lower-level corridor where he knew Dukat was intending to go, Odo’s swift liquid race took less than fifty seconds and ended when he streamed from a wall-mounted air vent, reforming into his familiar solid shape from his boots up, as if he were a wave of honey being poured into a transparent humanoid-shaped container.
At once, he looked around to be sure of his location: the side corridor leading to the false wall that cut off the long-concealed section of DS9. For six years, Leej Terrell’s secret Orb research lab had escaped detection by Starfleet engineers and teams of retrofitters.Before that, not even Gul Dukat had known of its existence during his control of the station.
It had taken Jake Sisko and Nog, as boys playing in the Jefferies tubes, to accidentally discover the walled-off section of corridor and the hidden lab. The two youngsters had used it as their private holosuite, never suspecting that what seemed to them to be holographic environments were actually illusions created by the Pah-wraiths—illusions intended to tempt corporeal beings into the Pah-wraiths’ realm.
But by the time the three Red Orbs of Jalbador had been brought to the station, the secret of the hidden section was known to Sisko’s command staff. In fact, for Odo, only three mysteries had remained when DS9 was destroyed.
Why were his memories of the Day of Withdrawal, along with those of Quark and Garak, inaccessible?
Who had killed the two Cardassian soldiers in civilian clothes who had been discovered fused into the station’s hull as if they had been deliberately beamed to their deaths?
And who had murdered Dal Nortron, the Andorian merchant of dubious ethics whose arrival on DS9 had preceded all the events leading to the destruction of the station?
Now, standing on the spot where Dal Nortron’s body had been discovered—or would be discovered in just a few hours in this timeframe—Odo felt certain he was about to solve the third mystery. With luck, he hoped that he might even stop it from ever coming into being in the first place, simply by saving Dal Nortron’s life before it could be taken.
He paused, listening carefully, but heard no one else nearby. Feeling confident he had arrived well before Gul Dukat, he moved to the false wall that hid the small intersection leading to Terrell’s lab and pressed his hand to the seam between the false panel and the real one beside it. Taking advantage of the near-microscopic space between the two panels, Odo flowed through the crack and reformed on the other side like a crystal growing on a cave wall.
There was light in the hidden section, spilling out from the open door to Terrell’s lab.
Odo temporarily changed his eyes from humanoid-normal to those of a nocturnal Vulcan primate, enabling him to see the dimly lit corridor as if it were high noon.
The corridor was empty.
Odo returned his eyes to their usual size and construction as he moved quickly toward the open door. Pausing on its threshold, he beheld the laboratory’s flawless recreation of an ancient village of the Bajoran moon, Jeraddo, as it had existed almost one thousand years earlier at the dawn of Bajoran space travel. It was the same illusion that Jake and Nog would discover two days from now, when Jake’s research for his latest novel would inspire the two friends to revisit their childhood playground.
The details of the Jeraddan village were derived from the Cardassian memory rod that Dal Nortron had brought with him to DS9. But unlike the Andorian, who Odo knew was inside the lab’s reconstructed village right now, convinced he was using a Cardassian holosuite, Odo understood that since the village was what Nortron most wanted to see, it was what the Pah-wraiths were showing the Andorian in order to bring him closer to their realm.
Stepping through the open door, Odo sensed the subtle changeover to the slightly weaker gravity of the moon as his foot crunched into gravel.
It was night here. To the west, the Bajoran stars formed summer constellations like spilled jewels. To the east, the horizon was beginning to glow with the blue-green light reflected from Bajor itself, still unseen on the moon’s dayside. A soft breeze blew, and in the village of stone buildings about a kilometer distant, Odo could see flickering candlelight in small windows.
But he saw no sign of Dal Nortron.
“NORTRON!” Odo kept his hands cupped to his mouth and shouted twice more. But not even an echo came back to him. He would have to go into the village.
Odo knew that Sisko had found the third Orb of Jalbador hidden in a mural wall in an underground chamber of a large structure in the village, as it really existed in this time: battered ruins on a world that had been transformed from Class M to Class Y as it had been converted into a seething power source for the hungry world it circled. Though the map had not shown the Orb’s exact location, Odo decided the Andorian would be close to it. Because the map was incomplete, whoever had given or sold it to Nortron must also have given him verbal instructions for interpreting it. Otherwise, it would have been worthless.
Odo began to run, then leaped into the air and became a Kalari lightning hawk, flying the kilometer to the village in only a few seconds of hyperfast wingbeats.
Settling to the stony ground on the outskirts of the wide plaza at the center of the village, the changeling returned to his humanoid shape. The glow on the horizon was becoming brighter. Again Odo cupped his hands to his mouth and called Nortron’s name.
Still no response.
But a shadow darted past a small building at the far corner of the plaza.
Odo recognized the rotund form of the stubby-antennaed Andorian in his bulky fur vest. Odo called out once more, but Nortron merely hurried on, head down, eyes fixed on what Odo took to be a small map reader, and then disappeared around a corner.
Odo sighed, thinking that solids could be so typical. Try to save their lives, and what do they do …
He began to run again, deciding against changing shape to avoid startling Nortron, or possibly offending the Andorian’s solid sensibilities.
Odo raced around the corner where Nortron had disappeared, then skidded to a stop, sending small rocks flying. The Andorian stood facing him, the metallic blue gleam of a small, knife-shaped stinger gun clutched in one hand.
“What are you?” Nortron said shakily. Odo had encountered panic enough times to recognize its presence when he heard it.
“I’m Odo, Chief of Security for DS9. Your life is in—”
“I said, what are you?!” Nortron gasped in a thin, rising voice.
Odo realized that for whatever reason, the Andorian was in no condition to listen to reason. He had to be disarmed first, warned second.
“I’m here to help you,” Odo said firmly as he took a step forward and—
An incandescent stream of relativistic ions shot forth from the Andorian’s stinger, striking the ground where Odo’s foot crunched into the gravel.
Sharp, glowing stone fragments sprayed up into the air.
Startled, Odo stared down at his foot, fully expecting to see his boot sliced in half faster than his restorative autonomic reflexes would have been able to act.
Instead, his boot was intact. But it rested in the center of a small glowing pit of melted rocks.
Odo snorted in exasperation. “Now we do it my way,” he growled as he shot out his hand to cross the two meters to Nortron, to grab the stinger.
But then shock caused Odo’s hand to snap back to him like rubber. His hand had passed through the Andorian’s. Suddenly, Odo understood why he had been unable to get a response from the communication node in the corridor.
His footsteps in the gravel prompted the Andorian to fire at him again, once at the ground, then once above the sounds of his footsteps, directly through his midsection.
But Odo felt nothing. The beam had no effect on him.
“Out of phase,” Odo said to himself. Somehow, he could interact with the solid, nonliving elements of this timeframe. But for living beings, or anything directly connected to them like Nortron’s weapon, Odo had no way of making his presence known.
As Nortron backed up, blue face glistening with sweat, short antennae fairly vibrating with tension, Odo wasted precious moments wondering how it was he could crunch gravel yet not make air molecules vibrate to produce the sound of his voice.
But, ever practical, the changeling abandoned the finer points of temporal physics to lean down and pick up a rock so he could scratch a message on the stone wall of the building beside him and Nortron. The Bajorglow was bright enough to allow such a message to be read, and surely the sight of a rock floating in air would hold the Andorian’s attention.
But the instant he picked up that rock, Odo saw Nortron’s eyes bulge and his mouth gape open, and the Andorian spun around and ran off screaming.
Odo tossed the rock away in disgust, then chased after him.
Panting and wheezing, the out-of-shape Andorian took almost five minutes to reach the improbable open doorway that hung suspended in midair a kilometer from the village, framing a corridor that was in distinct contradiction to the rocky landscape surrounding it.
Nortron scrambled up and into that doorway, then frantically twisted around to push the door sideways, sliding it shut in Odo’s face.
But Odo liquefied to flow through the narrowing opening,re-forming beside the Andorian even as Nortron, gulping for air, placed his shoulder against the door to seal it more swiftly.
Then the door closed, and Odo and Nortron were plunged into blackness. At once, Odo heard footsteps hastily scurrying away.
With a sigh, Odo altered his form to that of a Ferengi mudbat, his humanoid eyes merging to form a dark membrane of thermalimaging cells, perfect for identifying prey on dark Ferengi nights when stormclouds cut off all starlight and perpetual thunderstorms had made the evolution of echolocation a rare event.
In the narrow, shimmering spectrum of infrared, Nortron was a blazing white blob moving rapidly away from Odo, toward the false wall. Odo glided after the Andorian, flying over him halfway. Peering down, the changeling caught sight of a dark band around Nortron’s face and identified it most probably as a portable thermal viewer.
Then Nortron slid open the false wall and the heat spectrum of the corridor changed, as did Odo, back to his humanoid form. The amount of shapeshifting he had undertaken since arriving on the station was beginning to take its toll on his energy. Except when absolutely necessary, he customarily avoided switching from form to form as quickly as he had today.
The false wall slid shut again and Odo saw Nortron standing in the ordinary DS9 corridor, peeling a pair of thin, dark goggles from his eyes. The Andorian shook the goggles once, and they self-folded into a small, square packet which he stuffed under his fur vest. The stinger gun, though, he kept in his other hand.
Aware that Nortron had only a few minutes to live, Odo came up with a simple but adequate plan. By using his limited ability to interact with the nonliving, mechanical parts of DS9, he would drive Nortron away from the site at which he had been or would be murdered.
As Odo fully expected, Nortron began hobbling on obviously strained legs toward the main corridor leading toward the turbolifts. The Andorian’s free hand grasped his ample belly as if to help hold it up and make breathing easier. In his other hand, he gripped the stinger as if he were drowning and it was his lifeline. Every few steps, Nortron glanced behind himself, his fleshy blue face still streaked with sweat, no sign of his panic decreasing.
This time, Odo didn’t need to change form to pass Nortron and stay ahead of him. Reaching the first intersection, the changeling stretched up to grab the overhead vent grille just beyond. When Nortron reached the intersection, Odo yanked the grille free and sent it crashing to the deck in front of the Andorian. Odo’s expectation was that Nortron would wheel to the left, heading away from the site of his murder.
But instead, Nortron instantly fired his stinger. Unfortunately, he also fired without thought or aim and with his weapon pointed to the side. Instantly, an ODN conduit erupted in sparks and smoke and flung the doubly startled Andorian into a spin that made him stumble through Odo and continue on in the same direction he had been going before, only now wheezing horribly.
Odo kicked the useless grille to the side and ran past Nortron again to set up another diversion. This time, he decided not to drop the grille. He’d hold it up so that to Nortron it would appear to be floating. Then Odo planned to push against the Andorian with it, physically forcing him to go in another direction.
But before Odo could set his new plan in motion, Nortron lurched to a stop in the corridor, staring ahead in even greater alarm.
“Did … did Atrig send you?” Nortron stammered.
Odo looked in the same direction Nortron did.
Dukat was there. Just as Odo had anticipated. Complete with robes and wild white hair. And for whatever reason, the Cardassian was in temporal phase, meaning Nortron could see Dukat, but Dukat, apparently, could not see Odo.
“Give me the Orb,” Dukat said.
“I … I don’t have it,” Nortron stammered.
Dukat raised his left hand as if making an idle gesture. “You will be rewarded.”
“No one else has arrived,” Nortron explained in a shrill, anxious voice. “Quark says I have to wait.”
“Or you will be punished,” Dukat concluded. His left hand began to shimmer with red energy. “I should think it would be a simple choice.”
“I have latinum!” Nortron pleaded. “I won three dabos! It’s in a dimensional safe in my—”
Dukat’s eyes sparked with red light. “Do I look like I want latinum?”
Nortron dumbly shook his head.
Odo thought furiously. As long as Nortron held his position, the Andorian was safe. His body had been found ten meters away, showing no obvious sign of having been moved. Odo just had to keep him from going that extra ten meters.
“Quark’s little scheme was merely a smokescreen.” Dukat held out his hand. “The Orb.”
Nortron swallowed audibly. “Please … whoever you are, I don’t have it. I was only given a map.”
Dukat’s face darkened with temper, puzzling Odo. The Cardassian apparently didn’t know his history. Vash had brought the first Red Orb of Jalbador to Deep Space 9, while it was Nortron who brought the map that showed the rough location of the second Orb. And the third Orb had been hidden in Quark’s bar since the Day of Withdrawal. So why would the Dukat of the year 2400 think the Andorian had one of the Orbs, when the historical record would indicate otherwise?
“You are Dal Nortron, are you not?” Dukat asked angrily.
The Andorian nodded.
Odo looked around for something heavy he could detach from a wall or the ceiling and use as a club.
“You have been in contact with Leej Terrell, yes?”
Nortron shook his head in denial.
Dukat’s voice became acidic. “You spoke of Atrig.”
“Yes,” Nortron said hurriedly, frantic to please his interrogator. “Atrig came to me. Gave me the map. Told me to contact Quark to arrange an auction.”
“Atrig works for Terrell,” Dukat hissed.
“I … I didn’t know.”
“And she has the third Orb.”
“I … I don’t know about that, either.”
Dukat advanced on the cringing Andorian. “Oh, she’s had it since I ran this station. Right under my nose. Can you understand the betrayal I felt?”
Nortron backed up, nodding vigorously, clearly desperate not to do anything to further provoke Dukat.
Odo grunted with satisfaction as he spotted a section of an ODN conduit that hadn’t been completely closed. It appeared he could rip down about a meter-and-a-half section of the composite, half-walledpipe that contained the optical cable. The pipe would make a good club to knock Nortron unconscious, so the Andorian couldn’t move the ten meters to his place of death.
“You aren’t what I had hoped for,” Dukat mused in an almost dreamily singsong voice. “Of course, in this time, I wasn’t hoping for much … only a chance to serve the Amojan. And so many years from now, when I found out about you … the summoning of the Orbs … your murder … the station’s destruction …”
“Mmmurder?” Nortron gibbered.
“You’re a shadow, my friend, a ghost of what was, never to be again. But I was hoping that this time around, you would tell me what I need to know to serve the Amojan … so I can retrieve the Orbs for his power and his glory….” Dukat peered at the Andorian. “Can I have an Amojan from you?”
“Ama … Ama …” But in his horrorstruck state, Nortron couldn’t form the name of Kosst Amojan, the Evil One, the Pah-wraith Dukat served.
“Last chance,” Dukat warned. “Then I shall let history resume its flow, Amojan be his name. Who has the Orbs now?”
Odo decided he had waited long enough. He had hoped he might learn something useful, but he wasn’t the only one who knew about Nortron’s fate. Dukat did, and he was preparing to speed him to it. The changeling reached up for the loose ODN conduit.
“Oba—Obanak!” Nortron abruptly blurted.
Odo hesitated mid-reach at the mention of that name, looked back at Dukat, saw the Cardassian’s dark eyes widen in surprise, a slight smile touch his gray lips.
“Prylar Obanak?”
Nortron wiped his face. His white hair lay in damp, flattened tendrils against his blue forehead. His antennae now twitched incessantly. “I … I don’t know if he’s a prylar. Just the name. That’s the name Atrig used. Obanak—he’s the one who … who gave the map to Atrig.”
Odo held his hands over the conduit, ready to take action the instant before Dukat could strike but also alert to learn more, especially about the prylar. In this time, Odo knew, Obanak had been involved in a Pah-wraith cult. The prylar had come to DS9 at the same time as Leej Terrell and her associates, Atrig and Dr. Betan. Those three had proclaimed themselves to be humanitarians come to retrieve the bodies of the Cardassian soldiers found fused within DS9’s hull plates.
But since Obanak had accused Terrell of being a mass murderer, a war criminal, why would he have provided Atrig, a member of Terrell’s team, with the map that led to the second Orb?
Dukat loomed over Nortron. “I beg your pardon,” he thundered. “But am I to understand that Obanak is already aware of the second Orb’s location?”
Nortron almost gagged in his terror, clearly not knowing how he should answer such a question. “I … well … he had the map … so maybe he looked at it … maybe … I don’t know.” Then, in a single stream of fear, Nortron wailed, “Pleasedon’tkillme!”
Dukat reared back. “What can I say? To me, you’re dead twentyfive years. And who am I to argue with history?” Imperiously, he raised his left hand. It began to radiate with red energy even as Nortron began to whimper mindlessly.
And then Odo snapped the conduit cover loose and in a single movement swung it through the air to impact not Nortron but Dukat, in a stunning blow to the side of his head.
The Andorian squealed like a stuck Tellarite and ran off, thick legs pumping like a prime athlete’s.
Dukat was slammed into a bulkhead, then whirled around, dark blood running from his mouth, his red eyes literally afire.
“Too late, Odo!” he cried out, ducking. the changeling’s second wild swing to charge down the corridor in pursuit of the shrieking Andorian.
Odo raced after him, joining the chase, rushing around the next intersection in time to see Dukat direct a blast of red energy from both outstretched hands.
The double energy discharge struck Nortron square in the back, stopping him instantly.
Enveloped in a scarlet haze, the Andorian’s corpulent body rose into the air, tossed violently back and forth in the grip of a power Odo had never witnessed before.
Odo raised the conduit cover above his head to swing it down again on Dukat.
But without turning, Dukat swung one hand away from his attackon Nortron and pointed it behind him to fire energy not at Odo but at his improvised weapon.
The conduit cover splintered, useless; shards of it dropped from Odo’s hands.
Then the energy glow surrounding Nortron faded. The Andorian’s body stilled, dropped to the deck, and lay there, unmoving.
Odo stared at Nortron’s body. Its position exactly matched that in which Odo’s security team had found it, when the Andorian was discovered killed by an energy blast of some unknown type.
The power of a Pah-wraith from an impossible future …
Now Dukat spoke directly to Odo, but without looking at him, letting the changeling know that his presence was suspected, although the Cardassian still could not see him.
“Don’t you understand, Odo? You don’t belong in this time anymore. So there’s nothing you can do to change it.”
“You seem to think you can,” Odo muttered, not caring if Dukat heard him, as he looked about him for a new weapon.
“But,” Dukat continued, moving his head back and forth as if addressing an audience of thousands, “I do belong here. Because the Amojan is a timeless being. Vengeance without end.” Dukat sighed as if he still had more to say but had run out of time to say it. He looked down at Nortron’s lifeless body. “From the few station logs remaining from the fall of Deep Space 9, I know you never solved this crime. But as you can see, it was always me. I hope you feel better now. Your perfect record will no doubt bring you much solace when you find yourself back in your own private hell.”
With that, Dukat’s hands flared with energy as he abruptly lifted them and thrust them forward, and Odo barely had time to twist his body out of the way of the blindly aimed attack that sprayed along the corridor.
“Amojan, your will be done in the Gateway, as it is in the True Temple,” Dukat vowed, then turned and stalked off down the corridor.
Odo slowly got to his feet, wondering if Dukat truly thought he had been successful in banishing him from this timeframe. But if that’s what the Cardassian did think, then Odo wasn’t about to object. He remained motionless so as not to make any sound, only moving when he was certain Dukat was gone.
Then Odo hurried over to Nortron. At the very least, he’d changethe body’s position to make it look more like the murder it was. In fact, he realized, this is the perfect place to write a message to Captain Sisko.
A long-missed feeling of relief came over Odo. All he needed to do was to find a shard of the shattered conduit cover, then use it to scratch a message into the bulkhead. Odo was certain his own security staff would notice it when they recorded the crime scene, and within hours, he could be communicating with Sisko—and even this timeframe’s version of himself—over a computer link.
Odo picked up a shard from the conduit cover, judged the sharpness of it with his thumb. It was perfect, easily able to mark the soft decorative metal used in sections of the wall panels on this level.
He returned to Nortron’s body, already composing his message.
Such a simple thing to change history, he thought. Then he held the shard to the bulkhead and—
—was struck by a flash of red light so powerful it felt distinctly like a physical blow.
Odo fought to keep his balance and then noticed with dismay that both his hands were pressed against the bulkhead for support, the shard gone.
He stepped back unsteadily, looking down at the deck for what he had dropped. And then he realized it wasn’t the only thing now missing.
Nortron’s body was also gone.
In its place, the telltale crime-scene seals and forensic markings of his security investigation of Nortron’s murder.
“I’ve gone forward,” Odo said aloud. It was the only explanation. But how far?
He stumbled as he ran through the corridors to the turbolift, too exhausted to propel himself in his fluid form.
He staggered off onto the Promenade, intending to go to his office.
But there was no need to search for his answer there.
It was right before him.
In the flickering, shifting bands of red-colored light that played across the Promenade’s deserted expanse.
Odo lurched forward, bitter with the realization that he had come too far into the future, past the moment of DS9’s destruction.
Through the overhead viewports on the Promenade…s second level, he saw the energy displays of the red wormhole.
His mission had failed.
The Pah-wraiths had won.