Bloodletter

CHAPTER 10

IT DIDN’T MATTER if she were dreaming or not. All that mattered was the firepower in her hands.

More than Kira had ever known before—if she closed her eyes, the weapon’s weight drew her to the center of Bajor, as though her world’s heart had been given to her to bear. The metal sweated in her palms, a living thing with its own desires. Her desires—the killing machine she held had read the fire in her soul, the part of her that had consumed the rest, that wanted revenge and the bestowing of pain equal to her own. Now, the fire was locked inside the weapon, ready to be released with the slightest motion of her finger.

“Sure you can handle that thing?” The assault team’s oldest member, a grizzled veteran of anti-Cardassian campaigns, watched her. He sat with his back to the wall of the drainage ditch, his face and gear smeared so that he looked as though he were made of the same mud and wet stone. Kira knew that the man had been going on raids against occupation facilities while she had been a hollow-ribbed child in the refugee camps—but it hadn’t been that long ago. “We could maybe equip you with something a little more . . . suited to you.” He turned his head, drawing in the scent of the predawn air and whatever it could tell him.

“I can handle it.” She knew she was being tested. There was no room in the assault team for weaklings. She had already packed the shoulder cannon and a brace of its shells enough kilometers to leave her legs trembling from exhaustion. A patch of skin on the small of her back had been worn raw by the weapon’s metal stock. It was antique military tech, heavy and loud, and coated in the same dirty grease as everything else the Bajoran resistance carried; worse, it was completely outclassed by the Cardassian guards’ armaments. Well-aimed, though, it could do an impressive—and soul-satisfying—amount of damage. The one time she’d fired it—the resistance didn’t have enough shells to waste any on target practice—the power transfer link for one of the largest strip-mining complexes on the planet had been reduced to glowing scrap. “I’ve done it this far.” Kira shifted the cannon’s bulk, making sure that its delicate electronic sights were shielded from the drizzling mist.

“Here they come.” The team’s scout ducked his head back below the wall’s top ridge. “Six of ’em.”

Kira saw the older man, the team’s de facto leader, stiffen. “We were told five,” he said.

“You go up and count them, then.” The scout handed over his binoculars. The sniper fire from the Cardassians’ perimeter pickets had taken out the team’s fourth member, and had made them all jumpy.

She watched as the leader, standing with his head hunched low, adjusted the binocs’ tracking range. A faint green light shaded the rims of his eye sockets. After a few seconds, he dropped back down and crouched between Kira and the scout.

“All right—the five I recognize. I’ve been on operations with all of them before. The sixth one I don’t know, but he appears to be unarmed.”

“Bajoran?” Kira looked up to the ridge. “A prisoner, maybe?” The Cardassians had a wide range of techniques for pressuring the weak-willed into becoming collaborators. Some didn’t need to be convinced.

The leader shook his head. “I don’t think so. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

When the larger group came within a few meters distance, the scout signaled to them with a flashlight shuttered to a single radiant point. A minute later, they had all scrambled into the ditch.

“Who’s this?” Kira’s leader nodded toward the sixth man.

“Political officer.” The point man for the larger group propped his rifle against the stones. “Sent out from headquarters.”

“That’s all we need.” He looked in disgust at the black-clad figure.

“Perhaps it is.” The political officer spoke in a low voice, a surface calm darkened by a brooding judgment. His unsmiling gaze measured his critic. “There have been reports . . . of dissension among those who seek to overthrow the oppressor. A failure of unity in our purpose. Such things are wounds, brother, by which Bajor itself is bled. That dawn is coming when the oppressor’s vanities will be trampled in the dust; we must purge our own hearts and make of them vessels of light, to be worthy of that which shall be granted to us.”

Talk and fine words . . . Kira crouched with the shoulder cannon, listening and mocking inside herself the overly dramatic words. They seemed so pointless to her. Hearing them made her feel like a child again, listening in on the elders’ endless debates and theological discussions in the camps’ barracks, tired old men splitting infinitely finer hairs and formulating political agendas that would never come to pass. That, as much as her hatred of the Cardassians, had finally pushed her into picking up the gun and joining the resistance. It had been a good thing for her that she’d been starved skinny and breastless; she had barely been able to crawl beneath the last camp’s barbed wire, the metal thorns tearing the thin fabric of her shirt and leaving a set of bleeding stripes down her back, stripes that she’d worn as a badge of honor until they healed and faded.

Words . . . and at the same time, this man’s voice. The part of her that mocked fell into silence inside herself. And listened. The way that his companions listened, a leaning forward, as though every sense must gather in what he said.

Her team’s leader was the only one who didn’t partake of this communion. His gaze flicked across the other men and then, eyes narrowing, came back to the political officer. “You can save your little inquisition for later. Right now, the rest of us have work to do. If you’re not toting weight, the best you can do is stay out of our way.”

“As you wish.” The political officer, broader across the chest and a head taller than the team’s leader, nodded once. “Let the righteousness of your faith be the shield that protects you in your endeavors.”

The team’s leader grumbled something under his breath as he turned away. “All right, let’s move out.”

Kira lifted the shoulder cannon. . . .

And then, for a moment that stretched to the night’s horizon, her hands were empty. She squeezed her eyes shut in confusion, wondering if she were dreaming now or at the edge of waking. She didn’t seem to be standing in a muddy ditch with the familiar stars of Bajor overhead; she crouched in a narrow metal chamber, its low ceiling pressing against her back. And she herself was different: not a skinny teenager, hair beginning to grow out after being shaved for lice in the camp from which she’d fled; and not in the dirt-colored field gear of the resistance, but in a uniform with an emblem that she could almost recognize. . . .

The dreaming or the waking, whichever it was, faded away. She clambered out of the ditch, the shoulder cannon’s harness tugging her back into the ground, and hurried to catch up with the others.

Then, things didn’t go well.

I remember that, she murmured to herself. She pressed her hands against the metal walls binding her, as though they were the weight of memories pressing the breath from her lungs. I remember . . . but you’re dead. . . .

The metallurgical installation went up in a fireball that resembled a new sun, straining against the hot leash rooted in the blackened towers. It had serviced the largest of the Cardassian construction yards based on Bajor—the alloys and massive framing girders going from its forges into the starships and heavy cargo freighters hauling away the rest of the planet’s wealth. The plant’s tailings and chemical wastes seeped into the groundwater, and into the lungs of the Bajorans unlucky enough to work there, a forced assignment that was little more than a five-year-long death sentence. To see a cancer like that erased from Bajoran soil . . . Kira had felt the flames leap up in her heart as well, as she had taken her eye away from the cannon’s sight. Two of the shells she had gotten off, as she had knelt beneath her comrades’ covering fire, had torn open the plant’s central power source, the overload surge igniting the rest of the facility.

That part had gone all right—the dead had the comfort of knowing they had succeeded in their task.

It had been a suicide mission all along; Kira had known that and accepted it without a second thought. What surprised her was how quickly it changed, from the near-sexual glow of triumph inside herself, to the sudden adrenaline rush of fear that blocked out all except the animal desire to survive.

“They’re behind us—”

She didn’t know which one of the assault team had spoken; she turned her head and saw the dark shapes ranged along the crest of the hill, and knew that they were a unit of the Cardassian defense forces that had managed to circle them undetected. The hot barrel of the cannon burned her hands as she scrambled to swing it around. She didn’t make it.

The first impact lifted her off her feet and into a tumbling flight surrounded by shattered rock. If it had been a direct hit, she would have been torn to bleeding pieces as quickly as her comrades at one side.

More luck: she landed in a bank of soil that crumbled beneath her, her half-conscious form sliding into a ravine a few meters deep, the water at its base tangled with exposed tree roots. The wet dirt covered her face and torso, shutting off her breath. Her hands pawed feebly at her mouth and nose, but were too weak to clear them.

Just before she passed out from lack of oxygen, she felt another’s hand grasp her by the arm. The figure—she saw only a silhouette outlined by stars—pulled, drawing her up onto her feet, legs trembling beneath her.

“Kira—” The political officer kept her from collapsing with an arm clasped around her shoulders. She didn’t wonder then how he knew her name; later, she realized it had been part of his duties. “Can you walk?”

She nodded, coughing to clear the mud from her throat. His voice, even though no more than a whisper, seemed to impart its strength, evoking her own. The sound of heavy military machinery drew her gaze. Adrenaline sped her pulse as she spotted the Cardassian defense forces prowling the ridge above.

The political officer drew her back into the shadows. “They’re sweeping the area.” He turned his face toward hers. “We’ll have a better chance if we split up. At least one of us should make it, then.” He pointed along the ravine’s course. “Head north. There’s a resistance encampment in the Tohrmah hills.”

Crouching low to avoid being seen, Kira moved off. Behind her, she heard only a few softly spoken words, telling her to remember that her faith was a shield. When she was several meters away, she glanced back and saw the man’s silhouette as he watched for his chance; then he broke out of the ditch’s shelter. In a second, he had vanished into the darkness. She turned and continued on her own silent way, expecting fire to roll over her back at any moment.

She never saw him again. But she knew of him, and realized who the political officer had been—the name linked to the powerful voice—when, only a few years later, she first heard the broadcasts of the man who had become the leader of the Redemptorist wing of the resistance.

That voice had spoken her name once, in a crevice soaked with rain and blood. And then later, when both she and the man had become different from what they once had been. And yet the same. The voice spoke her name differently then, in a thunder of wrath and vengeance.

And then a whisper again, close to her as her own heartbeat.

Kira . . .

A whisper that promised death.

Her eyes snapped open, and she knew where she was.

Not dreaming, or lost in memory. Her hands pressed against the tight confines of the space where she had managed to hide herself, deep inside the substation’s maze of corridors and rooms. Beyond, she knew, were the empty reaches of the Gamma Quadrant, its ranks of stars cold needles of light.

And inside the substation, with her . . . he was there. The voice that had spoken her name. She turned her head, listening through the enclosing silence for a footstep, or a breath that wasn’t her own.

Nothing—but she could still feel his presence.

She had run from the substation’s command center, losing herself in the branching network of doorways and compartments. All she had known was that she had to find somewhere safe, if only for a little while, just long enough to think. To plan, to find a way of surviving.

Exhaustion had felled her, more quickly than whatever weapon was in the hand of Hören Rygis. Curled inside a remote storage locker, its hatch pulled tight, she had panted for air, feeling herself falling, as if the metal at her back had parted beneath the weight of the memories she bore.

They had claimed her. As though she had never been able to escape them.

Forget, she commanded herself, as she had done so many times before. She knew it was impossible. But still . . .

Kira drew in a deep breath, feeling her muscles tense in readiness. For now—she willed the dark, unforgiving thoughts back into the chamber from which they had escaped. Just until you’ve done what you must. To survive.

She reached out her hand and pushed open the locker’s hatch, then leaned forward and peered into the waiting shadows.

CHAPTER 11

HE LEANED across the desk toward the station’s chief officers. They had gathered in Ops and then, for security reasons, relocated their meeting to the private office. “All right,” said Commander Sisko. “Status report on the substation mission.”

“There have been some developments.” Jadzia Dax, DS9’s chief science officer, had taken on some of the duties that would ordinarily have been performed by Major Kira. “We’ve picked up a monitoring signal that indicates the substation actually managed to exit the wormhole. It’s relatively close to the position in the Gamma Quadrant that had been its original destination.”

“Any communications?”

Dax shook her head. “Negative. Our own diagnostic signals show evidence that the transmitting and receiving equipment aboard the substation was either damaged during the convulsive event inside the wormhole, or had been tampered with before leaving the station—possibly with some sort of delay trigger, to keep the sabotage from being detected until it was too late for us to do anything about it.”

“What about the cargo shuttle? Any sign of it?”

“That will be a much more difficult question to answer, Commander. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the stable wormhole has transmuted from a bipolar to a unipolar state, anchored in the Gamma Quadrant. This is an entirely different cosmological anomaly. In a very real way, for us, the wormhole no longer exists. At least, not as we had begun to understand it. If the cargo shuttle is still inside what might be termed a cul-de-sac or pocket universe, we presently have no way of determining its status. I’m sorry.”

Sisko swiveled toward his chief engineer. “What do you think? Is there anybody still aboard the cargo shuttle?”

“There would have to be, Commander.” O’Brien’s expression was grim. “The only way they could’ve gotten the substation out of the wormhole was to fire off the disengagement bomblets—use that force like the propulsive element in a cannon shell. I was wondering if they’d figure that out. Evidently they did; but, for it to work, one of them would have to stay aboard the shuttle, to initiate the trigger sequence. My guess would be that it was Doctor Bashir.”

“Undoubtedly.” Sisko nodded. “It’s Kira’s mission—she’d want to see it all the way through. And there would’ve been no way for her to know what was about to happen with the wormhole.”

Dax spoke more softly. “It’s still possible that Bashir is alive. Before our end of the wormhole collapsed, sensors seemed to indicate that the shuttle’s impulse engines had been activated—without the buffers being on line. It’s a reasonable assumption that that was the cause of the convulsion; essentially, a defensive reaction on the part of the wormhole’s inhabitants to a potentially lethal shock. If Bashir was able to shut down the engines, soon after we lost contact, then the shuttle might not have been destroyed. At this point, we just don’t know.”

“Yes . . . ” For a moment, Sisko’s gaze drifted from the faces arrayed before him. Inside himself, he saw images shift and merge together, a kaleidoscope of memory. He knew more about the wormhole’s inhabitants than any other sentient creature, and they remained enigmatic to him. They had spoken to him through the masks of his own history; the dead had spoken to him. Even his wife, the emptiness he carried beneath his breastbone, an emptiness with a name that he murmured aloud in sleepless dark hours. What had the wormhole’s inhabitants learned of the human mind and soul by studying him? That there was violence and grieving in the outside universe. Better if a saint had found his way in there— the words he’d told himself before mocked him again. Perhaps a saint would have been wise enough not to make promises that would wind up being broken. And now, Bashir might be the one who would have to pay for that.

“It is possible that he shut down the impulse engines in time—” Dax’s voice tugged at his awareness, bringing him back to those around him. “There are indications that the wormhole, in its altered state, still exists in the Gamma Quadrant; our monitor beacons in that sector are still picking up several band segments of the wormhole’s signature energy emissions. The cargo shuttle could be simply drifting inside the wormhole, with Bashir aboard.”

“If he’s still alive.” Sisko saw no value in analyzing the situation in anything except the harshest possible light. He turned to the security officer. “What have you been able to get out of the other Redemptorists?”

“Not much.” Odo shook his head. “We have enough evidence to hold them indefinitely, on suspicion of complicity in the sabotage of the substation mission and the murder of their fellow group member. And the smuggling aboard of a known terrorist leader wanted by the Bajoran security forces. If you were to order it as my top priority, I could almost certainly assemble airtight cases against them. But as far as getting information out of them, at least in time to do us any good . . . ” He shrugged. “They’re a closemouthed bunch. Fanatics. Their ideology is more religious than political in nature, and they’re certainly willing to die for as well as kill for it.” A certain self-satisfaction could almost be seen in the security chief’s face. “As I’ve indicated before, it was an error to ever have allowed such types aboard the station in the first place.”

“We’ll deal with those regrets later. Have you managed to confirm that Hören Rygis is aboard the substation?”

Odo gave a curt nod. “That is something on which the Redemptorists are not keeping silent. They’re rather boastful about it, actually.”

“You’ll have to keep the pressure on them. Any useful information we can get—”

“May I remind you, Commander, that my interrogation of these men is not unhindered by other considerations? Word has gone through the whole station that I’ve taken them into custody; the news is bound to reach Bajor soon, if it hasn’t already. You’re aware of how volatile the provisional government is right now; when the legitimate political wing of the Redemptorists hears about these men being held, it’s going to demand either a complete explanation or their immediate release—”

“Those are not concerns of yours, Constable.” Sisko’s voice grew stern. “I’ll deal with the political situation on Bajor. Your job is security, and right now the security of this station and its personnel depends upon the outcome of the substation mission. That’s why we need you to get those Redemptorists to open up.”

Odo betrayed no sign of emotion. “As you wish, Commander.”

One of Sisko’s hands rubbed at the ache that pulsed behind his forehead. “All right, then. Keep pushing for establishing communication with Major Kira. By this point, I don’t think we need to warn her about Hören—she’s almost certain to be aware of his presence. But we still might be able to assist her somehow.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll be in contact with all of you, so I can be given updates on any developments.”

Dax regarded him with a raised eyebrow. “Where are you going, Commander?”

“To Bajor.” Sisko stepped behind her and the other officers as they headed for the door. “There’s someone else I need to talk to.”

“Now,” he said, “we are going to have a little conversation.” His words bounced off the barren metal walls. The other cells along the corridor outside were empty. “You have much to tell me, and I’m sure that I’ll find all of it of interest.”

On the other side of the table, the four Bajoran microassemblers—once there had been six of them aboard the station—shifted uneasily. Odo had entered the cell without using a key, flowing between the close-set bars and then reassembling his humanoid form on the other side. He assumed that the Redemptorists had been aware of the shapeshifting abilities of DS9’s security chief, but he had found in the past that a demonstration often worked to unnerve suspects and make them more receptive to his pressure techniques. Once someone began to doubt the true nature of the physical objects around him, and began wondering whether the chair on which he sat might not be listening to every word he said, then disorientation and helplessness could seep in.

Sometimes, in moments of quiet reflection, savoring an accomplished investigation—his greatest pleasure—he found himself admiring his self-sufficiency. In other places, other times, the police had had to conduct interrogations in pairs, “good cop” and “bad cop.” If he worked it right, he could be both.

“We have nothing to say to you.” One of the Redemptorists kept his arms folded across his chest. “Leave us in peace.”

So this is their new spokesman, thought Odo. He had observed the others’ glances from the corners of their eyes, waiting for the one in the middle to answer. A definite intellectual cut below the late Deyreth Elt, who at least had had a measure of intensity, a second or third-generation copy of the Redemptorist movement’s leader. The survivors of the group that had come aboard the station all had a sullen obstinacy about them, as though most of their brainpower had been devoted to their intricate craft, with the iron dictates of their faith filling in their inadequate personalities. Such types, he knew from experience, were often more difficult to crack than a superior mind—they could always lapse into a defensive silence, whereas a genius wouldn’t be able to resist proving how much cleverer he was than a mere security chief. As long as they kept talking, Odo would eventually find out what he needed to know.

“I thought we might talk about Hören Rygis.” For one of his physiology, all sitting positions were equally comfortable; now, he assumed one that clearly signaled a relaxed, even casual attitude. “Surely that’s a subject that you don’t tire of.”

A smug expression rose on the spokesman’s face. “Didn’t you hear enough of him before? We told you where he is.”

“Yes, of course. I was just wondering what he might be doing out there, so far away from his devoted little flock.”

“He . . . ” The smugness changed to caution. “He performs the obligations laid upon him by our faith.”

A canned phrase; Odo nodded slowly. “I see. You mean murder.”

All the Redemptorists glared at him sullenly. “Such acts,” said the spokesman, “are not murder. They’re justice.”

“Ah. Like what happened to your compatriot Arten.”

Silence.

“The problem,” said Odo, “is that you’re going to be tried as accessories to that ‘justice.’ Others might not take such a . . . complex view of these things. They might simply regard murder as murder.”

“So?” The spokesman shrugged. “A glorious martyrdom is welcomed by the faithful.”

“Yes, it usually is. Which is a good thing for you, since Hören certainly set you up for it.” He let the remark sink in for a moment before continuing. “That is, of course, if it actually was Hören . . . ”

The spokesman stiffened in his chair, as the others glanced nervously toward him. “What do you mean?”

Odo knew that the simplest deception would never have worked on the Redemptorists. These were men who had spent years in close contact with each other, and with Hören Rygis; small conspiratorial units, the smells of their own blood and sweat locked into their subconscious memories. There were a thousand little clues that even he, with his shapeshifting abilities, could never have gotten right. If he had disguised himself, taken on Hören’s face and body structure, and come walking into the cell, ordering his followers to confess all to their captors—they would have seen right through him. Their contempt would have been justified.

But to do it in front of them, the way he had come through the bars . . . to plant the tiniest of seeds in their minds . . . that would burrow deeper and deeper, and do its slow damage to the sureness of their beliefs. . . .

The body was easy enough; Odo had studied the photographs and the few available tapes of the Redemptorists’ leader, and had memorized Hören’s distinctive broad-shouldered form. He could even manage a reasonable approximation of Hören’s face, one that could pass muster for a few seconds, as long as the light silhouetted him from behind, shining into the Redemptorists’ eyes.

The voice had taken more effort: he’d had to experiment in private, sculpting inside himself the thickness of the larynx’s cords, the dimensions of the thoracic cavity, and the smaller, more intricate chambers of the sinuses, all that gave the voice on the recording chips its resonance. Even when he’d judged his mimicry a success, he knew that there was still some irreducible element, a power not in the material form, that he wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

But he was still close enough.

Across the table from the team of Bajoran microassemblers, the form and image of Hören Rygis leaned toward their startled gazes. The face of Hören Rygis smiled thinly, then his voice spoke.

“Your faith should be a shield. To guard you during the great task of cutting this pollution away from the soul of your world.”

They were all shocked into a dismayed silence. They stared at him as he resumed his usual appearance. He remembered the old entertainers’ maxim that it was best to hit one’s audience and then get offstage before they could pick the act apart.

Odo now tried to make himself sound as kind as possible. “The problem is, gentlemen, that you don’t know how much I know . . . how much of what you may have said before wasn’t spoken to your grand and glorious leader . . . but to me.”

He pushed the chair back and stood up. It didn’t matter how messy the logic of what he’d told them might be; in some ways, it was better like that. It gave their brains more to be puzzled about, to endlessly twist and turn in their thoughts. Just as long as the elements of doubt and suspicion were there.

“I’ll leave you now.” He stood with his back against the bars; a moment later, he was on the other side of them. The Redemptorists flinched. “I’m sure you have a lot to discuss with each other.” He turned and walked down the corridor between the cells, feeling satisfied with his work.

It would have been comforting to have someone to talk to. Humans were by nature social creatures, and he perhaps more than most. Julian Bashir wouldn’t have become a doctor, otherwise.

He let such musings roll around the back part of his head as he continued working on the circuitry of the cargo shuttle’s engines. His forebrain was preoccupied with repairing the damage he’d caused in his desperate haste to shut down the unbuffered impulse energy pouring out, before the wormhole’s convulsions had thrashed the shuttle to pieces.

“Damn . . . ” Another sharp corner of metal had bit his fingertips. Clearances were tight inside the panels, and he lacked most of the appropriate tools. Open-heart surgery on an exoskeletoned Thallasinite with a butter knife would have been easier. He sucked the blood from under his nail and leaned forward to peer into the electronic innards. Besides conversation, it would have been handy to have Kira here—so she could hold the flashlight.

Fortunately, the cargo shuttle’s engines had been equipped with a modular repair kit, updated by DS9’s Chief Engineer O’Brien, with most of the circuitry duplicated on plug-in cards. The control schematics could be scrolled through on a small readout screen; with that and a miniaturized logic probe, Bashir had been able to trace and reconnect most of the thin-filament wires he’d pulled loose before.

In doing so, he had also located parts that didn’t belong there at all. He had tugged them free and examined them on the palm of his hand. Some he could recognize, enough to be sure that they were what had caused the unexpected firing of the engines. A few override modules, a short-range remote trigger, some kind of delay device—nothing that O’Brien would have had any reason to install. They would have to have been wired in place back on DS9 by someone else—probably that group of Redemptorist microassemblers—at the same time the impulse buffers had been tampered with. But set off from close by; given the shuttle’s close quarters, the only possibility was that it had been done from aboard the substation while it had still been attached. The setting on the in-line delay circuit had given just enough time for the disengagement sequence to have been completed and for the substation to have reached the wormhole’s exit before activating the engines. The saboteur—Hören Rygis, of course; who else could it have been?—would not have anticipated that a way would have been found to get the substation out of the wormhole; Bashir figured that the Redemptorists had planned only to collapse the entrance to the wormhole, to prevent any outside assistance from reaching him and Kira. Once the triggering device had been set off, the delay circuit would have been needed for Hören to scramble back to whatever hiding place he had had in the far reaches of the substation. It was just a turn of bad luck that things had worked out even better for Hören, with Kira in the substation with him, while Bashir remained stuck in the wormhole.

That thought—that there was someone else on the substation besides Kira, now drifting somewhere out in the Gamma Quadrant, someone with apparently a wealth of bad intentions—kept him working long after his eyes burned with the fatigue of squinting into the dimly lit space. Before he’d found the trigger and delay, he’d only wanted to ensure that the engines wouldn’t come on again unexpectedly; otherwise, he would have gone on fine-tuning the shuttle’s transmission and reception equipment, trying to establish a communication link with Kira. To warn her, if nothing else. From this close to the wormhole’s exit, there was a chance of a signal reaching the substation.

He straightened his knotted back and rubbed the sweat away from his eyes. As far as he could tell, he’d gotten the controls for one of the engines back in working order—he wasn’t sure if there were enough cards in the repair kit to get the others back on line. The shuttle would be able to proceed on one engine, although at a reduced velocity. He’d have to run the autodiagnostics first, then go back in and patch up anything he hadn’t gotten close enough to spec. It was a simple matter of closing the hatch and pushing a few buttons. . . .

“Well done, Doctor,” he said aloud. His voice boomed hollow in the space. An old med school joke surfaced unbidden in his mind: The operation was a success. Too bad the patient died. He realized he didn’t have the least idea of what he should do next.

If he had managed to get the engine operational—a big if—then what? There had been some vague notion floating around inside his head, that he could come charging to her rescue. But if he fired up the engine, got as much thrust as he could from it, what would the chances be of getting the cargo shuttle all the way out of the wormhole in one piece? Or if he did, would the wormhole then collapse completely out of existence behind him? Without the wormhole’s shortcut, the Gamma Quadrant was sixty years’ travel from the edge of the Federation’s inhabited worlds, even at maximum warp speeds. He and Kira would have a long uninterrupted time to get to know each other.

Another if. If she were still alive.

Bashir closed the panel and punched in the code to initiate the autodiagnostic tests. Despite the darkness of his thoughts, he was pleasantly surprised when the small readout indicated that the impulse engine was functional within 70 percent of its rated load capacity.

Eyes shut, he leaned his forehead against the panel. The temptation to get the shuttle moving was strengthened by the dread of staying frozen in this spot, inert, cut off from all the rest of the universe . . .

“I should just do it,” he said aloud. “Just go—”

Is that what you wish to do?

He heard her voice behind him, and almost answered. Before he realized . . .

Slowly, he looked over his shoulder. He saw Kira watching him from the shadows at the far end of the engine chamber.

But not Kira. He saw that her eyes were empty, holding nothing but black space and scattered stars.

CHAPTER 12

WHEN SURROUNDED BY METAL, bound by the energy fields that keep an artificial world intact, a constant vibration settles into the fibers of one’s being, so small as to signal only the rubbing of one molecule against another. He had forgotten about that—it became buried in the subconscious for all aboard a Starfleet vessel or a station such as DS9, and was remembered only when one stepped onto the surface of a planet.

The reverberations of DS9, from the metal-on-metal clashes that shook the drydock bay, to the motion of subatomic particles inside the computers’ circuitry, was the sound of a machine, essentially a dead thing. The silence of Bajor was of something living.

Sisko stood in the central garden of the Kai’s temple. The high, enfolded walls shut out the distant street noises of the Bajoran capital. Here, the only sound was the ripple of water, the touch of a sheltered breeze on the courtyard’s small, shallow pool.

“Your thoughts are much disturbed, Benjamin.”

He turned and saw her. Kai Opaka’s attendants withdrew discreetly back into the temple’s cloistered halls, leaving them alone. The Kai’s calm, meditative appearance, Sisko knew, was like the surface of the pool they stood beside; hidden beneath, as had been revealed to him more than once, were quiet depths, chambers of secrets and truths.

One of his eyebrows raised. “Are they really so obvious to you?”

Kai Opaka smiled. “They would be obvious to anyone. Particularly”—the smile widened a bit—”if one stayed informed about developments here on Bajor, and on your station.”

“I see.” He wished, not for the first time, that there were time. Not the stuff of hours and minutes racing by, the continuing round of crises writhing like a basketful of snakes, missions and lives hanging in the balance of his decisions—but the endless dimension contained within the temple’s walls. If he had that sort of time, he could spend it in the presence of the Kai, if only to absorb the slightest measure of her wisdom. . . .

But he didn’t. “I regret,” he said, “that I can be here for but a brief moment. To consult with you.”

She sat down, her robes settling over the tiled edge of the pool. Her plump hands folded across each other. “I understand, Benjamin. More than you think. You mistake the nature of my contemplations here if you believe I have no awareness of the outside world’s urgencies.”

Sisko sat beside her. “Perhaps it’s not what I believe. But what I’d like to believe.” At the back of his thoughts, the digits of a clock’s readout sped faster and faster.

“You must beware the temptations of mysticism. Though you are not as other men—the things that you have seen, that no one else has, changed and are still changing you—yet you are inextricably linked to the physical universe. There are others besides your son who depend upon you.” She touched his hand. “I depend upon you, Benjamin. I am not such a foolish old woman as not to be grateful for the protection you represent for our order.”

Changed . . . he knew what she referred to. A body of secret knowledge shared between them. Some things that he knew, and others that were the Kai’s alone. The infinitely slow revelation of the wormhole’s mysteries . . .

The clock’s numbers raced into a blur.

He shook his head. “We’ll have to talk of these matters on another occasion. Right now, I’ve got the lives of two of my officers to worry about.”

“Of course, Benjamin. Your esteemed doctor and our Major Kira. My thoughts dwell upon them also.”

Someday, he would have to find out whether Kai Opaka received her surprising amount of information about the station’s affairs from leaks among the DS9 staff, or through some arcane ability of her own. “What do you know of them?”

Kai Opaka didn’t waste time telling him things he already knew. “The doctor . . . his fate is unknown to me. Or perhaps unknowable would be the better word. I cannot see. The inhabitants of what you call the wormhole have suffered a grievous injury; how they will connect that trauma to another outsider—another human being—in their midst, is a question only they can answer. Much will depend upon the doctor’s wisdom; what he chooses to do or not do, to extricate himself from his plight. And much will depend upon your wisdom, Benjamin.”

“How do you mean?”

“Their understanding of the universe beyond their little one, and their understanding of any entity other than their own, is derived from what they know of you. You are the one whose mind and soul they examined so minutely; you are the one who was judged by them. Or to put it more accurately, all of us were judged through you. Thus, you became an intercessor, pleading the universe’s case; that great responsibility was thrust upon one who was unprepared for it.”

He nodded slowly. “I know . . . ”

“What they found in your heart, Benjamin, they have placed in their store of knowledge.”

The Kai’s words weighed heavy upon him. If he could have switched places with Bashir, he would have. Let the fire fall upon me. He had gone into the wormhole with rage and loss darkening his soul. They still did; to think of them poisoning a formless world, whose inhabitants had never known pain because they had never known time itself . . . it was almost more than he could bear.

He might as well have spoken aloud; the Kai’s hand rested gently upon his. “You must remember,” she said, “that you bore light in there, as well. As much as any that ever emerged from them. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

“Perhaps I will, someday.” Sisko drew in his breath as he straightened his spine. “Very well. What about Kira?”

Kai Opaka looked away from him. “I do see her.” The Kai spoke in hushed tones. “More than I wish. Kira is surrounded by darkness. There is one who has sealed her fate inside his fist, as though he could crush her like an insect—though an insect’s life would mean more to him.”

“You speak of Hören Rygis . . . ”

“Yes. The enmity he bears her, among others, is well known.”

“Tell me about him. Anything might be of use to me.”

Her expression grew sadder. “Benjamin. You are looking for answers where there are none. There is nothing to tell of him. Hören no longer exists. There is a thing that wears his form and speaks with his voice, and carries within the flames of hatred that he ignited. But the rest is ashes. It has been consumed, burned away by his anger. Just as your anger, your loss, your pain would have consumed you if you had let them.”

He knew she spoke truth, as always. “Then tell me what I can do. To help Kira.”

“You can do nothing.” An iron thread tightened in Kai Opaka’s throat. “You understand that already, and you do not understand it. You could do nothing before, when you lost someone—someone closer to you than Kira could ever be—and you can do nothing now. That is why some part of you is still at war with both the universe and your own heart, as though they were one and the same, and equally guilty.”

He said nothing, letting her words fall through him like stones into the pool’s still water.

“That remains the hardest thing for you to do, Benjamin. To do nothing.”

“Of course.” He looked up at her, even managing a thin smile. “As you said, I’m linked to the world outside my skin. I can’t yet allow myself to be as wise as you.”

“Ah. But you didn’t come here for wisdom. You came here hoping that I had some kind of magic, a wave of my hand that would bring your doctor and Kira back from their fates.” Kai Opaka shook her head. “But I don’t. Not the way you think.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Sisko stood up. “I should go back to the station and . . . do nothing.”

“But you won’t.” Her smile chided him. “That is something we both know.”

Without any signal from the Kai, her attendants had appeared to escort Sisko from the temple. “Until another time.” The clock inside his skull had resumed its relentless progress.

“The same time, Benjamin. It’s always the same.”

He nodded, then turned and left her presence.

As close to her as her breath, her heartbeat; as if he walked behind like her shadow, turning when she did, stopping when she paused to listen to the silence held by the dark spaces. He watched her, feeling inside himself a glow of satisfaction, even of pleasure, that came from the power of observing without being observed in turn.

Hören crouched beside a doorway, studying the display screen he held. A pair of wires mounted with fusion-weld tips ran into the corner of the security panel that he had pried open. His prey showed on the screen as a simple red dot, alternately moving or stopping in a scrolling chart of the substation’s maze. His followers had done well in adapting the corridors’ web of sensors and communication lines for this new purpose. The expanded visual aspect was something he generated inside himself: on his mind’s screen he could picture Kira’s face as she gazed anxiously around herself, her body coiled with apprehension as she took a step into a sector where anything could be waiting for her.

He closed his eyes, savoring that vision. This moment had been so long in coming, from the first dark seed that had been planted in his soul, a seed of fire as he had watched the temple torn open by explosion and had known that his Redemptorist brethren, his children, were things of charred flesh and shattered bone, their corpses lying before the boots of traitors. The dead he had been able to forget—they had all known that sacrifices would be necessary to achieve the sanctification of Bajor—but not the face and name of their murderer. One whom he had saved before from fire and the crushing grip of the Cardassians—that memory was gall on his tongue.

If he had been as wise then as he had become . . . if he could have foreseen the evil that would grow in Kira Nerys’s heart, as the desire for justice had grown inside his . . . he would have let her die, breath choked by the soil of the world she would betray. Better if he had. But instead, that seed, the image of her laughing and triumphant, had been nurtured inside him, carefully tended, flourishing where he had uprooted every soft and tender part of himself. Thus, he had transformed her crime into his righteousness; the burning of that fire, a red flower that would never extinguish itself in his memory, had made steel of his will, sharper than before. Every Redemptorist had been touched by that new metal, the movement made stronger, the weak cut away, blood purged to holiness.

And now, the time had come for the final blossoming of that seed, the unfolding of intermingled fire and steel. If the price of taking her life was his own, he was more than prepared. All his labor, and the work of his followers, had gone to bring about this moment. When there would be no one but himself and Kira, no one to stand in the way of his uplifted blade, no one to shield her from the justice that now descended upon her. That had been the function of the various devices that the faithful, the small group of microassemblers aboard the strangers’ station, had so cleverly wired into the circuitry of the cargo shuttle. First, to cripple the vessel and leave it stranded in the midst of the wormhole, and then to separate Kira from her partner on the mission. All that had been done, to greater effect than he could have wished for.

Hören opened his eyes, gathering his strength inside himself. So much more was about to be accomplished: not just Kira’s death, but the banishment of the strangers, the lying Federation and all its servants, from the skies of Bajor. The only reason that the DS9 station’s commander and the others stayed was to exploit the wealth they thought could be obtained from defiling the wormhole, the source of Bajor’s most precious mysteries. And there were certainly enough traitorous factions in the provisional government, who maintained their ruling coalition by debasing themselves for the scraps of wealth dealt out by their off-world masters. All that would change now, or already had been changed; he had felt the shock wave that had hit the substation, as the unbuffered engines aboard the cargo shuttle had inflicted their wound upon the wormhole’s inhabitants. The triggering device, with its corresponding delay circuit, that Deyreth Elt had built for him had done its job. A regretful necessity—but how else could the Federation’s hold on Bajor be broken? Perhaps someday, when the faithful prevailed in righteousness, and Bajor had returned to the purity of isolation, then the wormhole might open onto its chosen world again, bestowing the crystalline gift that indicated its sanctity. . . .

He didn’t know if he would live to see that day. It was enough that he could help usher in its dawn.

The red dot on the display screen moved. Hören watched it, quickly calculating that she was heading for the substation’s control center, from which she had fled before. He smiled to himself.

It would be a pleasure to speak to Kira Nerys once more. Nearly as pleasant as what would come afterward.

She stood before him. “Kira—” He reached out his hand, hesitating, as though he wanted to, yet was afraid to touch her.

The image regarded him with its gaze filled with the bright points of stars. “Who are you?” Its voice was flat and hollow, with not even a pretense of human emotion. “You are not the same. You are not the one who is here . . . ” The voice drifted silent, as though the creature behind the image were searching for a word, a concept.

“Before,” said Doctor Bashir. He knew he was addressing one—or more—of the wormhole’s inhabitants. This was how Sisko had reported their manifestation to him, the incorporeal entities taking on faces and bodies from the perceivers’ memory, like empty clothing dangling in a forgotten closet. “That was another human being. Another man.”

“’Was’ . . . ” The stars showed in the Kira image’s mouth when it spoke. Without substance, the image hung suspended in front of Bashir, unable to cast a shadow among the others in the shuttle’s engine chamber. “That is the language of time. In that you are the same.”

“Yes.” He nodded slowly. More of his self-possession, and the scientist’s intent that had brought him here, had returned. He felt like a biological field researcher, carefully approaching a member of an undiscovered species, a rara avis perched on a tree limb, that might flutter away and be lost if startled by any sudden move. “The same . . . but different.”

“How can that be?” The image’s voice altered slightly, into an almost hostile, demanding tone. “You change in time. You are not the same in one time as another. And yet you are also different at the same time. Explain.”

It would be impossible, he knew. The wormhole’s inhabitants were of a different order of existence from himself; the pocket universe in which they dwelt was bound inside the larger one’s spatial dimensions, but transcended it in all considerations of past, present, and future. A metaphysician would be required then, to determine if in time, the universe that held all the galaxies was itself contained within the wormhole.

There might have been an occasion when Bashir would have been interested in puzzling these matters out; the doctor in him could already see the implications of a temporal continuum where the onset, progress, diagnosis, and cure of a disease were simultaneous; where death itself was equivalent to birth, both of them gems on the same necklace.

But not now. Not when Kira’s and his own life might still be at stake.

“The one to whom you showed yourself before—the one named Benjamin Sisko—he and I are both men, but we’re not the same man. “Bashir struggled to find means of communicating with the entities that shuffled in and out of the image before him. “We’re both the same kind of creature, but not the same individual.”

The Kira image frowned. “Your kind speaks in riddles, just as . . . before. You change from point to point in this time; yet you claim to be the same creature. How can you know that?”

“Well . . . ” He started feeling desperate. “That’s the function of memory. Part of us is a record of the changes we go through in time.” That sounded right to him; he decided to go with it. “It could be maintained that all we are—all that creatures such as myself are—is the sum of those changes.”

“Then you might change, in time, into the one called Sisko.”

“I don’t think that’s very likely.”

A pensive expression formed on the image’s face. “We do not change. We are . . . eternal. That is your word.”

He saw an opening. “But the universe outside us—the small one, that my kind calls the wormhole—that’s part of your kind, isn’t it?”

“Yes . . . ” Kira’s image nodded. “Our kind and the wormhole—we are the same . . . ” Its eyelids closed for a moment, hiding the empty space of stars behind. “The same flesh. That is what you would say.”

“Maybe ‘substance’ would be better. But it doesn’t matter.” Bashir resisted the urge to step closer, to touch the image’s hand, to feel whatever energy it was composed of. “The wormhole changed, though, didn’t it? Because of what happened—”

The stars changed to blazing suns, bright in the engine compartment’s dim space; he winced at their sudden fury.

“Yes!” The image’s other voice thundered from it. “The hurt—the wounding! As before, when one of your kind came among us. That one, the one named Sisko—he made a promise to us. He made time a thing to be bound, to be held in his hands; he said never. Never would the wounding happen, never would your kind come amongst us and hurt us—”

The image of Kira seemed to swell with rage, as though absorbing the physical dimensions of the compartment. Bashir found himself looking up into its black gaze. His hands, in a reflexive panic, clawed for the rungs at his back.

“Never is a thing of time—so he told us!” The image’s voice mounted. “So you told us! Your kind! But it is not so—it is a lie. There is no such thing as never—you come here and hurt us again. And always—”

His courage wavered for a moment, long enough for him to turn without thinking and scramble up the ladder. He pulled himself out of the access hatch and collapsed onto the deck above.

She was already there, waiting. For a moment, he thought it actually was Kira, kneeling down beside him. Until he rolled, exhausted, onto his shoulder and could see the blackness and the starry points inside the image’s eye sockets.

Its first voice spoke, gentler if only because it betrayed no emotion. “There is no need to speak in your defense. We know the nature of your kind; we have listened to, and gone deep inside, one who is both different and the same as you. What decision we make depends not on your words.”

The momentary panic had drained away from Bashir; he could faintly see his line of attack again, the way he had been trying to shape this strange discussion’s course. “‘Decision’ . . . ” He hoisted himself into a sitting posture against the bulkhead. “Don’t you see? That word alone implies an operation in time. Your kind will decide, and that will make things different now from what they were.”

The Kira image nodded, almost sadly. “Yes . . . our kind has already been changed by this time you have brought us. We are not as we were. To exist as your kind does . . . we do not know yet if this is a good thing. We look inside you and see that you are something called a doctor, as the other one is a commander. Know then, Doctor Bashir, that time and change and all the other aspects of your peculiar existence may be only a disease. And one for which you possess no cure.”

“That may be.” Another thought came to his mind, unbidden.

The image peered more closely at him, as though seeing through the bone shell of his brow. “That is true, Doctor. As you speak inside yourself: The cure for time is death. We know that.”

“It’s not a cure that my kind accepts.”

“Pity.” The Kira image regarded him with no change in expression. “See how much more suffering and pain you cause by not doing so.”

Anger, born of the entity’s incomprehension and his own failure, flared inside Bashir. “There is another one of my kind, whose semblance you have taken on—”

“Yes. That one’s exterior appearance was uppermost in your thoughts.”

“She’s in danger. I need to speak with her.”

Lines appeared on the image’s brow, as though the entity beyond it were puzzled. “That one is in no danger from us. That one no longer exists here.”

“Nevertheless . . . ” He made an effort to contain his frayed temper. “She exists elsewhere.”

The image shrugged. “Speak with her, then.”

“I can’t. The electromagnetic radiation . . . certain aspects of your nature make it impossible for me.”

Eyes closed, the image was silent, as though in deliberation or conference. Then its gaze settled upon him again. “That has been changed, as your kind would say.” It pointed down the passageway to the shuttle’s pilot area. “Go to that material object that enables you to speak with nonexistent ones. You will find it functions as you wish.”

As Bashir got to his feet, he saw the kneeling image begin to fade, bands of darkness rising through the visible form. Kira’s face, with its eyes of stars, looked up at him.

“We will speak again, Doctor. It is—also as you would say—simply a matter of time.”

He thought he saw its face evolve to a trace of a smile, before it was gone. When he was alone once more, he turned and hurried to the pilot area.

CHAPTER 13

SHE HEARD HIS VOICE, even as she inched forward in the corridor’s shadows.

“Kira . . . come on, answer . . . ”

Static crackled through the words, the background noise of a barely maintained comm connection. The source of the transmission was in some sense not far away at all, and in another, a universe away. It didn’t matter; the touch of that voice at her ear was as welcome as a rope tossed to one who was drowning.

“Kira . . . ” An anxious edge filtered into Bashir’s voice, detectable even through the haze of electronics. “Are you there . . . ”

The initial impulse that Kira felt was to push herself away from the bulkhead and sprint the last twenty or so meters to the substation’s command center. She fought that urge back; she had made her way as stealthily as possible through the substation; she was now completing the circuit that she had begun when another—and closer—voice had spoken her name. The voice of Hören Rygis had come from the substation’s internal comm system, one of the concealed overhead speakers being activated by a remote circuit whose other end could have been anywhere aboard. It had been an unreasoning animal response to have fled the command center, as though the voice had been an armed Hören suddenly revealed standing behind her. In actuality, she might have been running straight toward him; the hiding place she had found in one of the storage lockers could have been separated from the blade of his weapon by no more than a few centimeters of reinforced metal.

Stupid, she had told herself. She hadn’t survived a childhood in the refugee camps, and then her years in the Bajoran resistance, by giving in to panic like that. Her own instincts, and the military training she’d been given on top of them, were sharper; the only explanation she could give herself was that here in the Gamma Quadrant was the farthest she’d ever been from the soil on which shed been born. Bajor was no longer even a pinprick of light in the field of stars ranged in DS9’s observation ports. A thread had been broken for her, through which she had received some unknowable strength . . .

Come on, Major—” Bashir’s voice broke into her wordless thoughts. “I know you’re there . . . you have to be there. . . .”

She had to reach the command center and respond to Bashir’s transmission before he gave up and broke the link. At the same time, she knew that the stowaway Hören had detected her presence in this area before, and would logically assume that she would return to it at some point. Being at the farthest extension of one of the substation’s sectors, the command center formed a perfect cul-de-sac, a trap with no exit. To step into it, no matter how urgent the reason, might be the same as stepping into the center of Hören’s lethal plans.

Carefully, she crouched and peered around the next corner of the passageway. For what must have been the thousandth time since she had first heard her name spoken aloud, she reached down to the belt at her uniform’s waist, for the personal armament that would be holstered there . . . and found nothing. The weapon had been left behind at her DS9 quarters, part of a decision she had fully concurred with at the time. The substation was supposed to represent a permanent settlement, not a military expedition; it would be easier to maintain that position in a court of interstellar law if the substation was effectively unarmed, down to the lowest possible level. The only hostilities that might have been expected would have come from the Cardassian vessel under Gul Tahgla’s command, and he would be smart enough to realize that any warlike action would automatically invalidate any claim he might make on the sector surrounding the wormhole’s exit.

There were times when, paradoxically, defenselessness was the best strategy; unfortunately, the present situation—or what it had become for Kira—wasn’t one of them. She would have given a great deal to have a fully charged phaser filling her hand right now.

The command center’s doorway was open. She couldn’t remember if her fist had hit the retract lock switch on the inside control panel, or if she had heard the door slide back into position after she had bolted through it. Light spilled down the corridor from the center’s overhead panels. Keeping her back close to the bulkhead, she could see most of the interior, the control stations curving around the sides, the two empty operations seats . . .

And no sign of another living being.

Minutes had passed since she had last heard Bashir’s voice over the command center’s speaker. She prayed that he was still on the comm link, waiting for a reply or fine-tuning the cargo shuttle’s transmitter.

You’ve come this far, she told herself. You might as well go for it. She shoved herself away from the metal beside her and ran for the doorway.

Within seconds, she had dived inside, twisted, and rolled onto her feet, coming up with hands readied in an elementary defense posture. A quick visual scan showed that the center was empty; she slapped the doorway’s control panel and let her tensed spine relax only a fraction as the metal slid into place. She felt no safer than before, but a small measure of power had been reestablished.

“Bashir—” She leaned over the command center’s transmitter, one fingertip jabbing the respond switch. “This is Kira—”

“Great . . . I was just about to give up on this,” Bashir’s voice answered her. “Are you all right?”

“For the moment.” Kira looked over her shoulder, keeping an eye on the doorway.

“I was afraid you might’ve gotten banged up, when everything went crazy.”

“Negative on that; I came through fine.” She assumed, since Bashir had gotten the transmitter working, that he was in working condition, as well. “Now, listen; I need—”

“There’s something important I have to tell you, Kira.” His words broke through hers. “You’re not alone out there. Someone else is aboard the substation with you—”

“I’m well aware of that. He’s already revealed his presence to me. It’s Hören Rygis.”

“The Redemptorist,” Bashir said, nodding. “I guessed as much.”

“He’s been making broadcasts for months about how I should be killed. I don’t imagine he came along now just to talk politics with me.”

Bashir nodded again. Kira was simply confirming what he’d already surmised. “Then he had some way of firing off the cargo shuttle’s engines. It was his bunch that installed the devices I found. . . .”

“Good guess.” She found that it was easier to turn her back to the comm panel, her hand behind her on its switches, and keep watch on the closed doorway. “What’s your current situation? Are you in communication with DS Nine?”

“No—and there’s no way I can be, either. At least, not for the time being. When the shuttle engines activated without their buffers, the wormhole went through some major changes. The convulsion you felt was the least of it. The wormhole’s inhabitants collapsed the other end by the station. It was a purely defensive reaction, to keep out anything else that might harm them. Unfortunately, it means that as far as DS Nine’s concerned, the wormhole doesn’t even really exist. Whether I’m stuck inside it or not.”

“You’ve had contact with the wormhole’s inhabitants?”

“With mixed results.” Bashir sounded annoyed with himself. “They allowed me to get in touch with you. That’s about it for now.”

Kira nodded as she processed the new data. “You’ll have to keep working with them. Somehow, you’ve got to persuade them to open up the wormhole again. The comm equipment has either been damaged or tampered with, so I can’t get in touch with DS Nine. And even if I could, without the wormhole, there’s no way for Sisko to send any assistance out here to me—”

“There is another way. To get assistance to you, I mean.” Bashir’s voice grew excited. “I did manage to get one of the cargo shuttle’s engines operational; the diagnostics all check out on it. I could activate it and rendezvous with your position pretty quickly. We wouldn’t even have to do anything about Hören; you could be waiting by one of the hatches, we could get you transferred onto the shuttle in no time, and he could rot aboard the substation for all we care.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Kira took her gaze away from the door and stared at the comm panel. “The engines firing without their buffers is how things got screwed up in the first place. That was all part of Hören’s plan. If you activate them again, there’s no telling what the wormhole’s inhabitants will do.”

“Maybe that’s a chance we’ll have to take. If I gave it all the thrust it’s capable of bearing, I might be able to get the shuttle to the wormhole’s exit and get it outside before the inhabitants could do anything. Or they might expel the shuttle, like an immune system rejecting a foreign object—”

“Right, or they could crush it like an egg and spit out the pieces. Or dissolve it—and you—into sub-atomic particles. There’s no way of knowing what they’re capable of.” She shook her head in exasperation, leaning her weight on the panel. “And what if you did manage to get out? They’ve already shut down one end of the wormhole; why wouldn’t they shut down this one as well? Then we’d be stuck out here in the Gamma Quadrant—without the wormhole, that’s a sixty-year voyage at maximum warp velocity—with nobody else in this sector except for a shipful of pissed-off Cardassians. Hören Rygis wouldn’t have to kill me; he could just watch us die of old age.”

She didn’t speak of what else the disappearance of the wormhole would mean: the complete triumph of the Redemptorists’ plans for Bajor—to render the planet valueless to the Federation and isolate it from all the other developed worlds. If her death was necessary to keep that from happening, she was ready.

Bashir wouldn’t be deterred, though. “Then what would you have me do instead? Your life’s in danger from that maniac. Do you expect me to sit here and do nothing?”

“That’s exactly what I expect you to do. More than that—I’m ordering you to do nothing. I’m still the commanding officer for this mission; its success matters more than either of us. As far as I’m concerned, my arrival at this sector at least gives the Federation a chance of making a claim of sovereignty over it—”

“That claim’s going to be pretty shaky if you’re dead.”

“A court of law would have to determine that. Look, I know you’re right, Doctor; if the Cardassians reach this sector and find nothing but a murdered Starfleet officer and a homicidal lunatic running around the substation, then they’re going to be in a strong position. The Cardassians could blow away the substation, assert their own claim, and justify it all with a legal defense of necessity. Maybe it would stand up, maybe it wouldn’t. But it’s not going to happen that way.” Kira leaned closer to the comm panel. “I can handle Hören; he’s a known quantity to me. I understand how his mind works. He’s already lost the element of surprise; if he was planning on sneaking up on me, there’s no way he can do that now. This isn’t your area of expertise—but I spent years fighting on different kinds of terrain. This substation is just one more. And I’ve got the advantage; the defense always does. Especially if I just have to hold out until we do come up with a way of getting some assistance to me.”

It was all a lot of big talk, she knew, designed to convince Bashir; she wouldn’t have bought it herself. She didn’t know what other surprises—booby traps—Hören and his followers might have wired into the substation. Or what weapons he might be carrying—if she were going to arm herself, she would have to cobble together something from the medical equipment aboard. If she had the time, and the means of getting to it before Hören intercepted her. It wasn’t a matter of defensive strategy at all; it was more like walking naked through a forest of knives.

“I don’t know . . . ” Bashir sounded unconvinced. “It still strikes me as risky.”

The real risk, Kira knew, was in Bashir’s emotional, impulsive nature. She played her final card. “There’s something else to consider, Doctor; something that I heard you talk about, before we ever left the station. We can’t do anything that would harm the wormhole’s inhabitants—not any more than we’ve already done. We don’t have the right to do that.”

His lack of response over the comm link indicated that her words had hit their target.

“All right.” Bashir’s voice finally came through the speaker. “If that’s what you think is best. But I still don’t like it.”

She wanted to tell him that she didn’t like it, either, but stopped herself. Already she had spent far more time than she had intended, convincing him of the need for inaction on his part. Hören and an army of Redemptorists could have marched on her by now.

“I’ll stay in touch with you,” she said. “As much as I can. But don’t worry—I’ve got everything under control.”

She broke the link before he could make any reply. With that connection gone, and with it the human touch of his voice, the substation’s silence folded around her.

He leaned back in his seat, looking at the shuttle’s comm panel. A blinking light told him that the link between him and Major Kira had been terminated—for the time being—on her command.

“Great,” said Bashir disgustedly. He laced his fingers behind the back of his head and stretched out his cramped shoulder muscles. He still felt the effects of spending several hours in a tight space, hunched over as he had worked to get one of the shuttle’s engines back online. A fat lot of good he had accomplished by doing so; the shuttle now had the motive power to possibly get out of the wormhole and come to Kira’s rescue—a not inconsiderable goal in his mind, for several reasons—but he didn’t have the authority to fire the engine up and do it. His hands clenched tighter together in frustration.

And the worst of it, the logical and emotionless part of his brain had to admit, was that Kira was almost certainly right. He had to admire anew her sangfroid in going through her list of reasons justifying his inaction; all the while some demented religious maniac might have been creeping up on her. The angry-at-the-universe attitude that she had always carried around herself like a shield, back at the station, had concealed a mind fitted with precision-cut steel gears. Yet, one that could also factor human elements into the equations; the business about not harming the wormhole’s inhabitants had been almost perfectly calculated to evoke the maximum desired reaction from him.

She’s the one who should’ve been a doctor, thought Bashir. The control of patients—really a form of benign psychological manipulation—had been a topic at medical schools for centuries. Plus, Kira wouldn’t be one to shrink from using a scalpel, if necessary.

Bashir slumped forward, hands in lap, then glanced over his shoulder at another section of the pilot area’s control panels. The readouts showed that the external sensors that had been installed in the cargo shuttle were still operating at peak capacity, soaking up every fluctuation in the wormhole’s complicated soup of electromagnetic radiation. There would be some interesting data, once he got it all back to DS9, where he and Chief Science Officer Dax could start breaking it down. The data would have been significant enough, if this had turned out to be a routine voyage through the wormhole. Now—with the convulsion triggered by the firing of the unbuffered shuttle engines, the manifestation of the wormhole’s inhabitants inside the shuttle, and the changes in the bands of radiation to allow the comm link to function—the accumulated information could be the basis for not just a groundbreaking but a definitive study of the wormhole’s fundamental nature. A ticket to the Federation’s highest scientific awards might just as well have been tucked inside the data collectors.

There was a certain temptation, he had to admit, to blank out the rest of the universe and its problems, Kira’s included, and just concentrate on the input from the sensors, monitoring the data stream to make sure that it was coming in as pure and unhindered as possible. He had already been ordered to do as much by the mission’s commanding officer. No one could blame him for following those instructions to the letter. . . .

No one but himself.

“Even worse than that—” He nodded slowly. “I’ve started talking to myself.” The isolation of being stranded in the middle of this pocket universe was no doubt affecting his sanity. That was his clinical self-diagnosis. Now would be a good time for the floating committee of the wormhole’s inhabitants to make a reappearance. He could use someone to talk to. Whether it, or they, wore Kira’s face or not no longer mattered to him.

“Hello?” He raised his voice as he swiveled the chair around toward the center of the pilot area. “Anybody home?”

Silence. They were probably listening to him, and laughing. If they could laugh; that hadn’t been established yet. Bashir had to ruefully congratulate himself for providing the focus point for yet another investigation into the physiology of nonmaterial entities.

He glanced once more at the panel showing the activities of the shuttle’s external sensors. That, he knew, was what he should be doing, giving over his entire attention to that scientific process.

Instead, he remained seated, the point of his chin pressed against his doubled fists. His thoughts had already exited the wormhole, and now moved through their persistent calculations out beyond, in the Gamma Quadrant.

She didn’t know what he was thinking. That was the problem.

The layout of the substation was becoming more familiar to Kira, from her having already traversed it more than once. It was too late to kick herself for not having memorized the chart of the branching corridors and rooms before leaving DS9; there had been no reason to expect that she would ever need to be familiar with more than a few different sectors around the substation’s command center. Now, however, a functional map was slowly being ingrained at a subconscious level, a system of passageways and enclosed areas that she could almost recognize from the trace of her own sweat that had touched the bulkheads.

Kira crouched down in a dark intersection of the shuttle’s main corridor. The problem with the map inside her head was that it didn’t show the most important element: where Hören was. For all of her confident talk to Bashir, the Redemptorist leader’s thought processes remained cloudy to her. She could reason out some things, based on her own past experiences with him and what she had learned from others’ encounters, but that still left out a crucial emotional component. It would be as much an over-simplification to characterize Hören Rygis as completely insane—no matter how demented-sounding his broadcast diatribes against her had become—as it would be to view him as coldly rational in his calculations. That he was obsessed with her—and with her death—there was no question; what form that obsession might take was still a mystery.

In the corridor’s silence, Kira let her thoughts roll on as she gathered her breath. The big question was how Hören viewed his own death. Always, in his broadcasts to his fellow Redemptorists, there had been talk of the need for all of them to make the ultimate sacrifice that would bring about Bajor’s purification. The cross between political and religious fanaticism always produced that kind of obligation on its followers, with the assumption that it held equally true for the movement’s leaders. Historically, it didn’t always work out that way: the pasts of any number of planets were littered with accounts of holy men sending the faithful off to die in battle, while they stayed safe inside their temples. She was convinced that wasn’t the case with Hören; he’d already put himself on the line by smuggling himself aboard the substation.

But if Hören was prepared for his own death, how glorious did he want it to be? After that one contact, the speaking aloud of her name over the internal comm system, he had as much as disappeared. He could be taking his time stalking her . . . or he could be preparing another surprise, on a far grander scale. It still worried her—putting it mildly, she thought—that the substation was constructed with high explosives throughout its framework. Both Bashir and Chief Engineer O’Brien had assured her that the explosives were as inert as clay without the fuse codes being read into them—but the Redemptorists had already proved themselves clever at rewiring the substation’s functions. Could they also have figured out some kind of a bypass, a way of igniting the explosives without the codes? If so, that would give Hören the ability to destroy himself as well as her, in a fiery cataclysm whose impact would be felt, symbolically at least, all the way back on Bajor.

That thought nagged at her, as well as the simple suspicion that all Hören wanted to do was move soundlessly upon her from behind, unexpected, snare her, and draw a sharpened blade across her throat. All that talk of blood. . . .Deep inside herself, she felt that the words, the thundering way he had spoken them, had to be more than empty verbiage. There was a physical longing expressed in them, the desire for a consummation that couldn’t be satisfied through cleansing fire, but only by the yielding of one body to another. A yielding where her blood would flow over his wrists, gathering in a shining pool at their feet, until he let her go, and whatever was left of her fell, broken.

Stop. Negative on that—her own voice inside her head short-circuited those images. That was a violation of all training and the survival instinct beneath; indulging one’s fears, letting them fester and grow along one’s spine, was a sure way of programming them to come true. Hören Rygis was as human as she, despite the voice of a wrathful god that he had summoned out of himself. He could be defeated, neutralized . . . killed, if necessary.

Kira saw nothing moving down the length of the central corridor. She stepped out of the shadows and along the bulkhead to the next sector. Her quick strides left the silence unbroken.

She had already decided that, whatever Hören’s plans might be, hers had to go on the offensive. He was obviously giving himself the luxury of time, the savoring of his prey’s trapped and cornered condition. That could come to an end all too quickly if Bashir, back aboard the cargo shuttle, found a way to persuade the wormhole’s inhabitants to reestablish its entrance zone. If that happened, Sisko would have an armed runabout from the DS9 station through the wormhole and out to the Gamma Quadrant in virtually no time . . . and that would be all it would take to push Hören over the edge. Whatever plans he had would go immediately to their climax; if he had a way of blowing up the substation, that would be when he’d push the button. If, on the other hand, Kira figured, all he wanted was to plunge a knife into her heart, he’d cut short this sadistic foreplay and move in on her before he could be stopped from the outside.

Either way, she needed to locate Hören and render him inoperative—that had been the usual Resistance phrase for all violent actions, up to and including murder—before he could carry out his plans.

A shape suddenly loomed in front of her. She quickly snapped back against the bulkhead, spine flattened against the metal. Holding her breath, she listened for the slightest noise, the least motion in the substation’s still air. A closed door was within reach behind her; she raised her hand toward its small control panel, ready to punch it, and dart through the opening, if necessary.

She heard nothing. Carefully, she leaned forward, enough to see a few meters farther on. The silhouette of her head and one corner of her shoulder slid along the flooring’s grid. The faint luminescence from an overhead panel had cast her shadow ahead of her, that was the only enemy within striking distance. She relaxed—only a fraction, still maintaining her scanning alertness—and moved on.

There was another reason behind her actions, that she could acknowledge only to herself. Inaction was something she could order Bashir into, but she would never be able to endure it for herself. Even if that had been the best strategy, to find a sector of the substation that she could barricade and defend, holding out until help came—she would have gone crazy, passively waiting for Hören’s attack. Anything would be better . . . to find him and fly straight at him, whatever weapon she’d been able to improvise raised in her hand . . . no matter what the outcome of that final, long delayed encounter might be.

That was the emotion burning in her gut. The force of it was just barely controlled by her brain. She would have to act in a precise, logical method, not just wander aimlessly around the substation. Already, as she had made her way from the command center, she had been planning how she would use the rough map forming in her head to make a systematic sweep of the substation’s corridors and sectors, how she could move through every space one by one, driving the hunter turned prey before her.

She had a dim memory, from when she had regained consciousness, of seeing something she might be able to use, in the dark hiding place she’d found herself in. A fusion welding rig, just barely compact enough to sling onto her shoulders and carry with her—it must have been equipment left behind by one of O’Brien’s work crews, or part of the substation’s own emergency gear. With that, she could seal off sectors as she cleared them, and bit by bit render a growing area of the substation out of bounds to Hören. Even if she could cut off just some of the routes through the substation that he must have mapped out for himself, that would still be a lessening of the advantage with which he’d started.

Now, her brain was working the way it was supposed to. She could already visualize everything happening the way she wanted, the methodical process by which Hören would be caught in his own trap. The best result would be if she could take him alive, corner him and seal him into a section where he would be rendered harmless, unable to get back at her. Then she would be happy to sit down and wait for assistance to arrive. It would be a crushing blow to the Redemptorist movement on Bajor to have its leader brought back in such humiliation, captured by the very woman he had launched such a holy war to destroy. She could see it all . . . and there was enough malice in her heart to relish the prospect.

That was still in the future, though. It was a satisfying enough vision to hang in front of her like a gauzy curtain, almost obscuring the length of the final branching corridor that led to the storage locker where she had hidden before. Kira put her head down and hurried toward the hatchway and the welding gear beyond it.

The future obscured the present. Enough for her to forget, to let her senses grow dull for a second—

And that was enough.

She felt a change in air pressure before she heard anything. Then above, something was dropping toward her. She turned, raising her arm to defend herself, but it was already too late. She was knocked sprawling onto the corridor’s flooring.

The human form’s knees pressed against her abdomen, pinning her flat. A hand grabbed the collar of her uniform, pulling her head forward. Dazed, she felt something thin and cold at her throat.

“Kira . . . ”

The voice spoke her name again. A whisper, almost loving in its softness. But this time she saw him. Hören Rygis lifted the knife blade under her throat, and smiled.

CHAPTER 14

HE NEEDED TO KNOW everything that had happened. That was why he called his remaining officers into his private office.

The image of Kai Opaka was still uppermost in Commander Sisko’s mind. Not just from this last visit to her temple, but from the cumulative effect her contact had upon him. In some ways, he didn’t know what had changed him more, his brain-dazzling experiences when he had first entered the wormhole, or the slow, stilled—and on the surface, much less dramatic—working of the Kai’s influence upon him. One had been a thunderbolt, cracking open a stone to reveal its hidden interior; the other, carefully measured and patient drops of water, one by one, accomplishing the same revelations.

“Let’s have an update,” he ordered as he swiveled his chair around to face the DS9 crew members. He almost shook his head, as though that would clear away anything obstructing his concentration on the job at hand. But he knew it was pointless; the touch of Kai Opaka was locked into a level deeper than his conscious brain. His soul, perhaps. He focused his gaze on the station’s security chief. “Any luck with our little band of Redemptorists?”

“Some.” Odo gave a noncommittal shrug. “I used on them a certain psychological ploy that I’ve found valuable in the past. It yielded a few . . . interesting results.”

“Anything we can use now?”

“That’s always the question, Commander. I’ve certainly been able to dig out a great deal of background information on Hören Rygis. If we’re successful in bringing him back here to DS Nine, it’ll be a toss-up as to what sort of legal procedure we should initiate against him—a criminal trial or a clinical determination of his sanity.” Odo gazed up at the ceiling for a moment. “Of course, you’re probably aware of my own preference in such matters. I am of the school of thought that defenses based upon the perpetrator’s alleged mental condition are inevitably fraudulent. I would rather simply, as the old police phrase goes, ‘nail the bastard.’ ”

“In this case, so would I, Constable. But we’re not at that point yet. If there’s something you’ve found out that we can use to get a handle on Hören Rygis, open him up—”

“Given enough time, Commander, we could do all that; we could psychoanalyze him in absentia until we were familiar with every facet of his mind. We already know, from what was in the records of the Bajoran security forces and from what Major Kira herself told you, most of the root causes of Hören’s murderous obsession. The Redemptorists that I’ve been interrogating have filled me in on some of the past details of which we had been unaware—apparently there was some contact between Hören and Kira some years preceding the raid she led on the hostage situation. And there will undoubtedly be other things the Redemptorists will tell us, and perhaps soon; once the first cracks appear in their psychological defenses, the total disintegration of that armor follows shortly thereafter. At least, that’s been my experience.” Odo’s gaze sharpened as he addressed the figure on the other side of the desk. “What must be answered, Commander, is what good the information I can extract from these men will be, if we can neither act upon it ourselves, nor relay it to Kira so she can use it.”

Sisko knew that his security chief was right. He turned toward Chief Engineer O’Brien. “What about it, then? Any progress on establishing communications with Bashir or Kira?”

“Negative, sir.” O’Brien shook his head. He nodded toward the chief science officer standing next to him. “Dax and I both have been working flat out on that one. There’s just no way—”

Dax spoke up. “We’re running into some hard physical realities, Commander. The intermittent bending effect we’ve detected before in the subspatial matrix actually seems to have been heightened by the wormhole’s change to a unipolar condition; as long as that persists, communications with the Gamma Quadrant are considerably accelerated. The problem is that the mission’s only subspace equipment is on the cargo shuttle with Bashir. The wormhole is still nonexistent for us here; until its entrance reappears, there’s no one to whom we can even send a subspace transmission.”

“There is one possibility—” O’Brien’s words were accompanied by a doubting grimace. “We thought of it but . . . I don’t know . . . it might not be something you’d want to consider.”

“By now, I’m willing to consider anything.” Sisko leaned forward across the desk. “What is it?”

“Well, technically speaking, the substation is not completely alone out there. There is someone else approaching that sector of the Gamma Quadrant. And that’s Gul Tahgla.” O’Brien shrugged. “And the Cardassian vessel does have subspace transmission and reception gear aboard.”

Sisko gazed at his chief engineer in astonishment. His initial reaction had been to tell O’Brien that he was out of his mind.

“You see,” said Dax, “it would be possible for us to make a request of Gul Tahgla, that he relay an encoded message to the substation. There are precedents for such actions, between parties that are not officially in a state of war with each other. Maintaining reciprocal confidentiality has been an element of diplomatic relations for centuries.”

“I’m not sure Gul Tahgla would see this matter in such an enlightened way.” Sisko rubbed the corner of his brow. “In fact, I’m sure of it. If he’s aware of our substation being in that sector, he’s bound to have figured out that we sent it there to frustrate the Cardassian empire’s claim of sovereignty over the wormhole’s exit. Why should he cooperate in the process of defeating himself? Especially, when he would know that he didn’t have to—by asking him to relay a message, we’d be as much as telling him that the mission had gone wrong somehow, that the substation might as well be disabled.”

“That was exactly our analysis, Commander.” The calm tone of Dax’s voice remained steady. “However, we cannot be sure of how Gul Tahgla would analyze the situation. He might assume that our claim of sovereignty had already been established and, after the subterfuge he committed to get his vessel through the wormhole, that it would be prudent for him to reestablish a cordial relationship with us. Also, he could be reminded that he and his crew now have no way of returning from the Gamma Quadrant, unless we here at DS Nine find a means of opening up the wormhole again.”

“If Cardassians were reasonable creatures, Gul Tahgla might assume those things.” Sisko tapped a finger against the desktop. “The reasonableness of Cardassians, however, has rarely been demonstrated.”

“True. I would not estimate our chances of success along these lines as very high. But—given our lack of other options and what’s at stake—it might be worth a try.”

Beside Dax, O’Brien’s scowl deepened. “I just have an aversion to asking Cardassians to do anything except kiss my posterior.”

“As do we all. However . . .” Sisko drew in a deep breath. “Let’s give it a shot. Have the communications officer initiate contact with Gul Tahgla’s vessel.” He turned to his security chief. “Prepare a synopsis of everything you’ve gotten out of the Redemptorists—anything that Kira might be able to use.”

Outside the private office, he took his seat in Ops. “Screen.” His officers stood behind.

The Cardassian’s image wavered before him. At this distance, with the signal shuttled through a string of relay beacons, visual static crawled erratically across Gul Tahgla’s face. A delay factor of several seconds had to be dealt with; a moment passed before the image nodded with a self-satisfied smile.

“Ah, Commander Sisko. Always a pleasure. I wouldn’t have thought we would be communicating again . . . so soon.”

Sisko pressed his palms against the seat’s arms. “I wouldn’t have troubled you if it weren’t a matter of some urgency.” The overly polite diplomatic language stuck in his throat like a sharp-edged stone. “I know that your own mission demands your full attention. But I have a request to make of you. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated by all of Starfleet, and by me in particular.”

“Indeed.” A higher level of interest appeared in Gul Tahgla’s eyes. “Then proceed, Commander Sisko. Consider me to be . . . at your service.”

“We’re having difficulties communicating with a unit of ours that is currently in the Gamma Quadrant, just outside the wormhole’s exit. It should be within normal comm range for your vessel, however. We’d like you to relay an encoded message to the unit.”

“Encoded?” The Cardassian feigned surprise. “What is the necessity for that?”

“Come, Gul Tahgla.” He held his palms spread out before him. “It indicates no degree of distrust between us. It’s simply a matter of . . . standard operating procedure. Surely it would be the same for communications between vessels of your fleet.”

“I see.” Gul Tahgla leaned forward, his image growing larger on the screen. His smile vanished, as though it had been part of a mask now discarded. “Let me say, Commander, that you display a remarkable degree of presumption. To ask this of me . . .” The Cardassian’s gaze grew harder. “Perhaps you would like me to thrust a dagger into my own heart as well?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he did know.

The smile returned, but as a much crueler thing than before. “What is that old Earth word that I’ve heard our mutual friend Quark use on occasion? Chutzpah—that’s it. For sheer nerve, you carry away the baked goods, as I believe the Ferengi would also say.”

Sisko stiffened in the chair. “You seem to display some unusual linguistic interests.”

“I’m making a study of exotic languages, Commander. I expect they will come in handy very soon . . . when I’m overseeing the passage of all the developed worlds’ ships out of the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant. I have time for these studies, as well; my crew and I are having quite a leisurely voyage back to the sector surrounding the wormhole’s exit. Where nothing—not all your little schemes, Commander—will prevent us from establishing sovereignty over that sector for the Cardassian empire.”

“Gul Tahgla . . . this isn’t what you—”

“Don’t indulge in these pretenses with me, Sisko.” The smile twisted into a sneer. “I’m well aware of your reasons for positioning that unit right where it is. My only regret is that you were able to figure out my intentions in time to make this abortive attempt at frustrating them. But your own haste has foiled you. And now, you expect me to help you repair whatever has gone wrong? Really, Commander.”

“You have my assurances—”

“Ah. Assurances from a Federation officer.” Gul Tahgla’s image wavered through another burst of static, then formed again. “I leave it to you to imagine what those assurances mean to us. Especially after having trusted your previous guarantees that the privacy of my vessel would be observed while in the DS Nine drydock. Obviously, those assurances meant nothing, or you would never have discerned what mission I had been sent upon.”

Sisko felt a twinge of revulsion in his gut, both at the gul’s self-indicting logic and at the awareness that in his own dealings with the Cardassians, his words and actions had begun to mirror theirs.

He made one more attempt. “There are lives at risk aboard that unit.”

“I hardly think so, Commander. You see, we have already been trying to communicate with it—and we have received no response to our signals. Please accept my sincerest condolences regarding whatever members of your crew were lost in your foolhardy attempt to circumvent the legitimate aims of the Cardassian empire. These are the hazards of command, are they not?” Gul Tahgla’s expression mocked sympathy. “When we reach the sector, we will make some attempt to retrieve whatever bodies may be aboard the unit, so they can be sent back to you for whatever religious observances you may consider to be appropriate—of course, only if we can do so safely. You have made many public comments about the shoddy materials and construction of the station you took over from the Cardassians; I doubt if anyone will blame us if we find ourselves compelled to . . . eliminate in as forthright a manner as possible this piece of DS Nine you sent out here. It is, after all, adrift right in the middle of what will be the traffic conduit into and out of the Gamma Quadrant. We would be performing a service to the developed worlds by disposing of this menace to navigation.”

Sisko perceived an opening. “Then, since you acknowledge that the unit presents no threat to you or your plans, you would naturally have no objection to relaying—or at least attempting to—our encoded message to it?”

“That would need to be determined, Commander. Feel free to send us the encoded message, and once my cryptographic analysis officers have broken it, read it, and made sure that its contents cannot compromise Cardassian interests—we might send it on.”

“Gul Tahgla—you’re aware of the degrees of Starfleet message security. It would take your computers years to decode the message.”

“Well, then.” The Cardassian shrugged. “Simplify matters for all of us—send the message unencoded.”

“That’s absolutely not possible.”

“I expected as much. For the sake of your crew members—if any of them are still alive—I hope the message you wished to get to them was nothing too urgent. Request denied. End of transmission.”

Sisko gazed up at the blanked screen. “Well,” he said. “That could have gone better.”

She looked at the face before her. The knife blade had been drawn back a few centimeters, the edge still cold against her throat, but allowing her to breathe. Kira worked at keeping her pulse steady, her muscles tensed for the smallest opportunity that might be presented to her.

“How many years, Kira?” Over the gleam of light on the weapon, Hören regarded her. “Since we were in each other’s presence . . . not that many, really. Not when you think about it. It’s just that . . . so much has happened since we were together.”

Her hands braced flat against the deck. “What do you want?”

“Why do you waste the little time you have left? Asking stupid questions—” His fist remained locked tight around the knife’s handle. “Surely I’ve made my desires—the desires of many people—clear to you by now. But then . . . you feel you have the luxury of time, don’t you?” Hören tilted his head, peering into the eyes of his captured prey. “And you do—much more than the ones you murdered had. Those brethren’s deaths were in fire and pain, though mercifully brief. They also died in the righteousness of their faith. That is a comfort I’m afraid will be denied to you.”

She felt the blade scrape across her throat as she arched her neck. “You know—I’m not really used to discussing theological issues when I’m flat on my back, with a knife drawn on me. Maybe we could go on talking under some slightly different conditions?”

“We could go on talking forever, Kira. But we won’t. Time is not infinite for us, though the consequences of our actions outlive our days. Your betrayal of your fellow Bajorans—not just the ones who died at the temple, but all of your race—that was but the blink of an eye, a moment come and gone. No doubt you little expected how long others’ memories would be, how that moment would eventually come full circle.” Hören leaned forward, closer above her. The knife blade pressed down, almost breaking the skin. “This is where the circle closes, Kira.” His gaze narrowed, as though the eyes were glittering steel within slits of thin flesh. “And time ends—for you.”

There had been no chance of him letting her up, dragging her up against the bulkhead with the knife still readied underneath her jaw—she had known that. Whatever depths Hören’s insanity had reached, he remained smart enough not to let the situation go on too much longer. An egotist who wanted to savor his triumph and the sound of his own words, but not a fool. Or at least not a total one.

She closed her eyes and gasped, as though fear had gripped her breath. “I . . . I can’t hear you . . . ” The whisper barely emerged on her lips.

His face came closer to hers, his words almost a kiss touching her ear. “You don’t need to—”

That was what she needed, a trick to take him off balance. Literally; his weight had shifted forward, poised awkwardly for a second. But that was enough—the sudden thrust of her bent legs against the deck, and her doubled fists striking beneath his ribs, toppled him over her. Just as quickly, she twisted her head to one side, feeling the knife graze a centimeter away from the corner of her brow.

She heard Hören’s weight hit the bulkhead, as she followed through on her own shoulder-first roll. Scrambling to her feet, she dived forward, hands outstretched. Her vaulting arc was broken when she felt her ankle snared from behind. She managed to contort enough to land braced against her forearm, protecting her ribs from the jarring impact.

Hören’s grasp tightened. He grunted with the effort of tugging her back toward him, his torso rearing up from where he knelt. The knife sparked in his raised hand.

Kira didn’t resist, but pushed instead against the deck, doubling the force of Hören’s pull. The heel of one boot struck him in the chest; his eyes widened from the unexpected blow. A split second later, as her fingertips clawed into the deck and twisted her onto her other shoulder, a scissors kick caught him on the angle of his jaw. His head snapped back, and the knife flew from his hand, disappearing into the darkness behind him.

He recovered faster than she expected. Panting for breath, Kira saw him grabbing for the knife, his hand falling instinctively upon its handle. His gaze broke from her, long enough for her to pull herself upright.

She turned and ran, shoulder colliding with an angle of the bulkhead as she pushed through a hatchway into one of the branching corridors.

She didn’t hear running footsteps at her back. But laughter.

“Is that what you wish to do?”

He heard the voice behind him. Turning his head, he looked over his shoulder and saw the image standing there. He had already opened the access hatch leading down to the engine compartment; he sat at its rim, legs reaching down to the rungs.

“I don’t know,” said Bashir. “But I knew you were watching me—all of you. I couldn’t think of any other way to make you show yourselves.”

A different voice, the angry one, came from the Kira image. “You see?” The image tilted its head back, the star-filled gaze directed toward an invisible audience. “So lightly this one threatens us! Our existence means nothing to such a creature!”

“That’s not true. I would never have come here among you if . . . if I didn’t think you mattered a great deal. Like all living creatures.” He craned his neck, trying to peer into the blackness of the image’s eyes, as if he might see all the wormhole’s inhabitants mingled in that small universe. “I wanted to understand you; that’s all. Curiosity is in the nature of my kind.”

“That comes from being in time.” The softer voice spoke once again. “You are blind things, attempting to see. If you were outside time, you would know.”

Bashir shook his head, sensing the gulf opening up between him and these bodiless entities. He could wander in that space for ages, trying to make himself understood by them in turn. “That may be. But we don’t have a choice about it.”

“That is not truth. There is one of your kind who exists both in time and not in time.”

The statement puzzled him. “Do you mean Sisko?”

“Not that one. He is still of the same nature as you. But there is another—do you not know?”

The riddles had started to make his head spin. “I don’t know . . . and I guess right now I don’t care, either. You can talk metaphysics all you want, but you’ll have to do it without me. I’ve still got to figure out what to do about Kira.”

Looking down at itself, the image studied the human form it had taken. “This one—” It laid a hand upon its breast. “That exists in your mind—that part you call memory—but not here.”

“Yes. She exists somewhere else, though. Outside the wormhole.” He gestured toward the bulkhead and the space beyond the cargo shuttle. “Outside where you exist.”

“The fate of this one concerns you. You are troubled that this one might cease to exist in time. Would this one still not exist in memory?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes . . . she would. But it’s not the same thing. Memory isn’t alive . . . not the way I am, and she is. Memory is like your kind. It doesn’t change.”

“Perhaps then it is a better way to exist. Changeless and eternal.”

His shoulders slumped. “I’m not going to argue with you about that. Maybe our kind is wrong, and you’re right. But it’s just in our nature. To prefer the living, and the changing, to what we think of as being dead.” The irony of the situation weighed upon him: before he had left DS9, this would have been the making real of dreams beyond his most grandiose ambitions. To have not only established contact with the wormhole’s inhabitants, but to go even further than Sisko had in understanding their nature. . . .

But there was no time for that. Not now. The wormhole’s inhabitants were right; his kind did exist in another way, one where the illusions of eternity slowly faded, to reveal the cruel steel gears of the universe.

The image regarded him with a frown. “Your nature makes you suffer. You exist in pain.”

“That is what’s sometimes called the human condition.” Bashir almost felt like laughing, a humorless noise collecting inside his throat. His immediate diagnosis would have indicated the cumulative effects of fatigue. “That’s why I keep thinking about activating the engine—even without the impulse buffers, and with the effects it would have on your kind—and heading out there. To see if I could do anything to help her.”

A shake of the image’s head. “That cannot be allowed. You have already brought pain and wounding to our kind. There are those among us who would cause your existence to cease, in order to defend us.”

“Still . . . you can’t expect me to just forget about a friend. And what’s going to happen to her.”

“You see that one in memory—but it is not enough. Perhaps if you could see that one in that other place—that place that is not here. Then your suffering would cease.”

He raised his head. “What’re you talking about? Can you do that?”

The expression on the image’s face remained placid. “It is close enough. What we can perceive can be shown to you.”

Bashir swung his legs out of the hatchway and scrambled to his feet. “Then show me. Now—”

The Kira image stepped toward him, bringing its face close to his. If there had been any substance behind the surface phenomenon, it could have brought its lips to his for a kiss. Instead, he found himself gazing into the blackness of its eyes and the stars swimming there.

“Look. If that is what you wish.”

He saw a brighter spot of light, and knew it was the substation drifting just outside the mouth of the wormhole. It grew larger, the stars disappearing behind it. Then it vanished, as he felt himself falling toward it.

Another dark space, its walls curving around him. He could almost sense them pressing against his shoulders, and at the same time he knew he was still aboard the cargo shuttle, gazing into the empty eyes before him.

He saw her then—Kira, the real one. Running before him, into the corridor’s distance. His hand reached out involuntarily, as though he could stop her. She looked over her shoulder, but her gaze went through him, toward another point. He called her name, but she didn’t hear; she ran without stopping.

Then he saw the other, the silhouette of a man, looming up before him, blocking out everything else. The man took a few steps forward, and Bashir saw the broad shoulders, the heavy arms dangling at his sides. In one of the man’s fists, a star glittered, a bright flare of light. But not a star. The man continued on his relentless path, and in the corridor’s shadows, the object in his hand resolved into a sharp-bladed knife.

“What is wrong?”

Bashir had stepped backward, away from the image before him. His own hand came up, shielding his eyes from the vision it had presented him.

“Did you not see this one?” A puzzled tone came into the image’s voice. “Does this one not exist out there, in time?”

He couldn’t answer. His fists trembled as he turned away, his gaze falling to the open hatchway and the engines in the dark space below.

CHAPTER 15

HE BROUGHT OUT the good stuff. From a locked cabinet by the welding equipment lockers; the deactivated jacksledge, hunkered down on its pile-driver feet, seemed to stand guard as he pulled out the bottle of Powers.

“All the way from Earth itself.” O’Brien broke the seal with his thumbnail and poured two fingers of Irish whisky into each of the glasses he’d set out on the workbench. “I’ve been saving it for special occasions.” He shrugged, shaking his head wearily. “Though we certainly don’t have much to celebrate. Your health.”

Sisko matched the toast and knocked back a mouthful. It tasted like a rain-drenched peat bog on his tongue and felt like fire sliding down his throat. “Thanks.” He could understand why the chief engineer was fond of the stuff, though he also knew it wasn’t going to do any good for either of them; they would get just about as inebriated by upending the bottle and pouring its contents out on the engineering bay’s deck.

It was the sentiment that mattered, however. Far better to have been invited here, amid the smells of raw metal and spent fuel—the bay always reminded him of one of the programmed modules in the holosuites, a re-creation of a nineteenth-century blacksmith’s shop, complete with eye-stinging black smoke and iron heated to a glowing red—than to be sitting in a booth in Quark’s lounge, an untouched synthale in front of him. If nonaction was the prescription he’d have to take whether he liked it or not—Kai Opaka’s words still weighed heavy in Sisko’s memory—it was best practiced in congenial, if cruder, surroundings.

“You can’t beat yourself up over these things, Commander.” O’Brien had drained his glass; he refilled it and topped up Sisko’s. “There’s a limit to what you can do.”

He managed a smile. “It seems to be my curse to be surrounded by people wiser than I am.”

“I don’t know about that. To be frank, I’m still puzzled about what happened up there in Ops.” O’Brien leaned over his arms folded on the bench. “When you had Gul Tahgla on the screen—why didn’t you give him an unencoded message to relay to Kira on the substation? Hell, he already knew we were in trouble with it.”

“Perhaps he did.” Sisko rolled a drop of the whisky around on his tongue. “And perhaps Gul Tahgla didn’t. The problem is, we can’t be sure. Tahgla might’ve just been fishing for confirmation of his suspicions—a confirmation that we would have handed over to him on a plate if we had given him an unencoded message. And, as long as there’s any doubt in his mind, he’s going to proceed that much more cautiously. When the Cardassians’ vessel gets within range of the substation, he’s going to stop and sniff around it, looking for any sign of a trap, anything that we could possibly spring on him.” He took another swallow. “That’s Gul Tahgla’s problem—and it’s one he shares with most Cardassian officers. They’re so constitutionally devious that they can’t imagine anyone else not being the same way. They can all waste shift upon shift, first creating suspicions inside their own heads, then chasing them down. Endlessly; even when they get proof that nothing underhanded is going on, they still won’t believe it.” The alcohol hadn’t cheered him up any, but had loosened his tongue; that was more of a lecture than he had intended to give.

“Hm.” The chief engineer had made significant progress on the bottle’s contents. The potential loss of Major Kira and Doctor Bashir had set him off. “Is that a good enough reason not to do it, though?” His tone was almost belligerent as he hunched over his glass. “Because you were the one who decided to contact Gul Tahgla in the first place. You said that helping our officers was more important than any reservations we might have about dealing with the Darcass . . . Cardassians.”

“True. Up to a point.” Sisko tapped a finger against his own glass. “And that point is reached when we do anything that might negatively affect Kira’s successful completion of her mission. She still might have a chance—and I owe her that much. When I gave her the mission, I indicated my trust that she’d be able to carry it out. I can’t second-guess her now. Because of circumstances that we were unable to predict, Kira is operating on her own, cut off from any communication with us.” He raised his hands, palms outward. “Fine—that’s what we’ll have to accept. But until we have hard evidence that she is in fact dead, we also have to assume that she’s continuing on the mission. If we could have gotten potentially useful information to her, we would have; but to do so at the cost of jeopardizing the mission itself would be cutting the ground out from beneath her feet.” Sisko shook his head. “I can’t treat a subordinate officer that way.”

“Not even if she might wind up dying? Because you didn’t?”

It took a few seconds before he could reply, seconds in which a hollow space seemed to open inside him. “Kira assumed a certain responsibility when she accepted the mission. And I assumed it when I gave it to her.” The words, though true, echoed bleakly through the emptiness. “That’s the nature of our job here. This is not a settled territory, where someone might reasonably expect a degree of safety. Things can go wrong very quickly. And then we have to deal with them, as best we can. That’s all.”

O’Brien contemplated the dregs in his glass. “I guess that’s why I’m glad you’re the commander here, and I’m not.”

“I wish I were glad about it.” He pushed his chair back. “Take it easy on that stuff, will you? You’re still on duty until this crisis is over.”

Deliberately, the chief engineer picked up the bottle—it was still more than half-full—held it out at arm’s length, and let it drop. It shattered on the deck, the brown liquid spattering across his boots.

“I wasn’t thirsty, anyway.” O’Brien kicked away a wet shard of glass. “At least, not right now.”

She leaned her back against the metal. As soon as she had gotten through the doorway, she had hit its control panel with her fist. The door had slid shut, cutting off the passageway. Panting for breath, Kira pressed her palms behind her, as though she could keep the door locked that way.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. The farther from the central corridor, the more the substation was set in darkness. By the faint bluish glow from an instrument panel, she saw the outlines of a row of pedestaled biobeds, most with surgical support frames hanging above. The frames were larger than the ones in the sickbays set aside for oxygen-breathing organisms, the clamshell forms capable of extending sealed atmospheric chambers around the beds. When the substation was still being designed for use as a quarantine module, the area would have been employed for the benefit of some of DS9’s more exotic visitors.

Its original function didn’t matter now. Kira pushed herself away from the door and ran to the rows of medical equipment drawers. She yanked them open, each gleaming metal tray clattering to the end of its track. All of them were empty.

“Damn—” She flung the last one closed in frustration. She had hoped to find something that could be used as a weapon. Even a simple manual scalpel would be better than her bare hands. Obviously, Bashir’s progress in fitting out the QM had been interrupted by it being commandeered for its new mission. There were probably crates full of implements that she could have used—surgical instruments were fundamentally variations on cutting edges, no matter how advanced the technology for making the incisions might be—and all of them were sitting in a storage locker back on DS9.

In her flight through the substation’s maze, she had come across a few cartons of simple bandages and other soft materials. Wonderful, she had thought grimly. Maybe I could wad them up and shove them down Hören’s throat—if I could just get him to say “Ah.”

She clambered onto one of the biobeds and looked up at the overhead surgical frame. The curved lens of its focused-beam spotlight glinted a transparent green. She stood on her toes and struck the lens with her fist. A shard of glass—a big one with an end wrapped in a bandage for a handle—could draw blood as well as sharpened steel. She ground her teeth together as the thick lens shivered with each blow, but didn’t break.

“Kira—”

The voice didn’t startle her, she had been expecting it at any moment. She quickly crouched down on the bed’s padded surface, scanning across the area’s darkness, ready to spring from it and run again.

Silence.

Carefully, she stepped down from the bed’s pedestal. Nothing moved in the darkened space. The voice had come from an overhead speaker—Hören could be at any point in the substation.

She called out. “Where are you?”

“I’m everywhere, Kira.” The whisper was overamplified, but still recognizable as Hören’s. “That’s why you can’t escape me. You never could. Because I’m in your heart, as well.”

“That’s a lovely thought.” Looking over her shoulder, she calculated the distance to the doorway. The impulse to dash for it, into the corridor beyond, was almost overpowering. “Sometime, you’ll have to show me the rest of your poetry.”

“Yes . . . ” Hören’s voice betrayed no anger. “We should talk, Kira. I admit I made an error in judgment. I underestimated how well you could resist your own guilty conscience. If we sat down and talked . . . perhaps that part of you that still acknowledges righteousness would accept that which comes with it. That is, justice.”

She heard something beyond the voice coming from the speaker above her. From another direction, and closer.

“You mean my death.” Kira kept her head motionless, looking out the corner of her eye.

“Such a harsh word. Don’t torment yourself with it.”

“Right, I forgot; that’s your job.” How had he traced her to this area of the substation? She had thought she had lost him all the way back at the storage lockers. And he couldn’t be talking through the entire comm system—there was another overhead speaker in the passageway beyond, and she would have heard the voice filtering through the door, if that had been the case.

It was a question that would have to wait for her to figure out the answer. She heard the other sound again, the slight disturbance in the still air. Behind her, somewhere down the row of beds.

“A regrettable necessity, Kira.” The voice oozed smooth from the speaker. “A movement such as the Redemptorists is fueled by the passions of its followers. Anger against a traitor is an effective spark for those emotions. I serve my followers by evoking it in them.”

“How noble of you.” She realized what the sound was. Someone’s breath, one bed closer to her now. “I wonder . . . if there’s something else that fuels your anger.”

“Oh? And what would that be?”

Slowly, Kira reached behind her, bracing her hands against the edge of the bed. “Guilt.” She listened to the area’s silence. “Not mine, but yours.”

The other sound, the careful inhalation and release, halted for a moment. “What do you mean by that?” The voice from the speaker above tightened a fraction.

“You survived, Hören. And they didn’t.” She flexed her knees slightly, rising a centimeter onto her toes. “The ones back at the temple, all those years ago. They died . . . your faithful brethren. I remember standing there, looking down at some of them . . . with the flames at my back. . . .” She raised her voice, so it echoed from the corners of the space. “It wasn’t pretty. Some of them lived just long enough to maybe wonder . . . where you were, Hören. And why you didn’t die with them.”

The breathing sound grew louder; she could picture the nostrils flaring, the cords tightening in the neck. She knew it came from only a few beds down the row.

“Really quite a common reaction, Hören.” Kira felt her palms sweating in anticipation. “Survivor’s guilt. Because in your heart, you don’t believe that I’m the traitor. You’re the one who betrayed them—”

A cry rang from both above and behind her. She sprang to one side, pushing the corner of the bed so that it rotated on the axis of the pedestal. The other end caught Hören across his abdomen, toppling him forward. Kira ducked beneath the arc of his knife; for a moment she saw plainly the contact microphone taped to his throat, which had picked up and magnified his almost inaudible whispering. A wire ran from the black dot of the microphone to a short-range transmitter clipped to his belt. She rammed the butt of her palm into the side of his head, but his momentum carried him on top of her.

The knife swung again, closer, and she felt a streak of fire along one arm. She thrust herself upright, her hands against Hören’s waist and shoulders, and heard him land heavy against the angle of the bulkhead and the floor.

Blood streamed down to her elbow; she was unable to draw her left hand into a fist. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Hören on his knees, pushing himself upright with one hand, his other arm dangling as though broken. Rage contorted his face.

She made it to the doorway before he could launch himself toward her. A quick stab at the control panel and she had stumbled out to the passageway, the door sliding shut behind. The narrow space tilted dizzily around her. Hören’s footsteps pounded closer, only slightly muffled by the door.

Reaching up with her good hand, she grabbed the edge of the metal surrounding the luminescent panel above her. It came free as she drew her legs up, her weight breaking the seal. A thin strip peeled loose, a few meters long, flexing in her grip. She jabbed the broken end into the doorway’s sliding track, just as Hören struck the control on the other side. The door ground to a halt as the metal strip, its other end still fastened to the ceiling, bowed to the snapping point. Through a gap of a few centimeters, she could hear Hören cursing incoherently.

Kira turned and staggered into a run. She clutched her wounded arm tight against her breast, the blood soaking into her uniform.

He heard her even before she spoke. Before she responded to the signal transmitted from within the wormhole—her ragged breathing spoke of exhaustion close to collapse.

“Kira—are you all right?” Bashir pressed his hand flat upon the comm panel’s switches. He had been trying to hail the substation for over an hour. “What’s wrong?”

“Under . . . under control.” Her voice broke into a crude simulation of a laugh. “I can’t believe it. I thought this was supposed to be some kind of a hospital unit, and I can’t even find a damn first aid kit . . . ”

The comment worried him even more. “What happened?”

“Let’s just say . . . I made contact with Hören. It wasn’t fun.”

“How badly are you hurt?”

“Like I said . . . under control.” The sound of her breathing steadied. “Surface wound from a knife; lots of blood, no major tissue damage. I was able to pull an insulation sheet loose from one of the control panel modules and bind it up with that. I seem to be getting function back in my hand—anyway, that’s the least of my worries right now.”

“What about Hören?”

“That is what I’m worried about.” Kira’s voice grew tense. “He’s still out there, roaming around the substation. That’s the worst of it—I don’t know where he is, but somehow he’s able to track me. Somehow . . . somehow, he’s able to pinpoint my location, no matter where I go. He was waiting for me; that’s how I got nicked by him.” Her voice paused for a moment. “You weren’t still going to try to get out here, were you? With that engine unbuffered—”

“I couldn’t, even if I made the attempt.” Bashir’s fingertip whitened from pressing against the switch. “Our friends here in the wormhole made it clear to me that they wouldn’t allow it. Remember what you said about them crushing the shuttle like an egg? It’d be something like that—I’d never reach the exit zone.”

“That’s one decision you don’t have to worry about making, then. If I could just figure out how he’s tracking me . . .then maybe I could lay a trap for him. . . .”

The answer struck him. “The thermal sensors. That must be how he’s doing it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“In the control panels for the doorways—” The explanation came rushing out. “The whole substation’s wired with them; it was supposed to be a way of monitoring patient movement through the quarantine module. There’s a microscanner right beside the door release switch on all the panels—Hören must have some way of tapping into the data grid they feed into. He just sets the readout sensitivity for your body temperature, and he can tell when you move from one sector to the next. It’s the only possible way he could do it.”

“Great—is there any way of shutting down the system?”

Bashir shook his head, though he knew she couldn’t see him. “Not from the command center. The data line’s bonded to the structural members; you’d have to practically disassemble the whole substation to get rid of it.” His thoughts raced ahead; they were the only way of reaching out to help her. “But you can fool the system. Now, listen carefully—he knows where you are right now, so you don’t have much time. You’re going to need some things; there’s a group of supply cabinets a couple of sectors over . . . ”

At first, he had thought he would have to do something about his arm. He had heard the crack of bone when he had landed, his full weight impacting against his own flesh. Now, the arm dangled uselessly at his side, the wrist curled outward. A net of loose wiring that he had torn from the control of one of the biobeds would have served as a makeshift sling, but he had at last balled it up and thrown it away from him. The pain served a better purpose, the grating of the splintered ends against each other with each step he took; it honed his anger to a brighter, sharper edge. It had been sharp enough to kill before; now Hören felt as if he could slash the metal of the substation apart if need be, to reach through and grip her throat in his good hand.

He leaned his shoulder against a bulkhead, close to a doorway, fumbling with the buttons of the small tracking device. It had taken some effort to wedge open the control panel and get the device’s wires into place. Effort, and time—Kira had already gotten away from him, more than once, and he blamed his own slow delight in her trapped situation. A weakness, for which he now bitterly lashed himself. Vengeance, the justice of the Redemptorist faith, was to have been a sword, quick and irrevocable, and he had almost dropped it. No more.

The grid showing the substation’s layout came up on the device’s small display. Hören thumbed the button below it, scrolling through sector after sector, until a red dot blinked on. Somewhere close to the command center; that made sense. He knew that Kira had been using the comm equipment there, to link up with the other Federation officer, who had been left behind in the wormhole. Not that it would do her any good.

He was about to pull the wires free and stow the device in his pocket, where the knife lay waiting, when another red dot appeared. The grip of his good hand tightened convulsively on the tracking device as he stared at it. At a point that would be a few meters away from the first, the thermal sensors had picked up another source of body heat.

It can’t be—He jabbed at the buttons, but the red dots remained, blinking steadily. There couldn’t be another person on the substation; he would have felt through the frame the shudder of the docking hooks grappling onto any vessel that had approached. Unless the person had been able to beam aboard the substation—but the cargo shuttle, even if it had been able to exit the wormhole, lacked personnel transporter equipment. And there were no other vessels in the area. . . .

A third dot appeared on the display. Then a fourth, and a few seconds later, a fifth.

An army, a dozen or more, showed by the time a wordless cry of anger escaped from Hören’s lips. He smashed the lying device against the bulkhead, the display going blank as the microcomponents fell out of the broken case and onto the deck.

Hören struck the control panel and rushed through the door before it had slid halfway open. With his head lowered, he drew out the knife and headed down the corridor.

She pulled the silvery blanket closer around her, careful to keep her head covered by it. Bashir had told her that shielding her arms and legs wasn’t so important—the main sources of body heat radiation, that the doorway sensors were set to pick up, were her torso and head. A chill leaked from the thermonic blanket, raising gooseflesh across her shoulders. Its medical purpose was for the treatment of fever patients, its activated thermal-exchange circuits the equivalent of an old-fashioned ice bath, but more controllable. Now, for Kira, it served as an even more effective form of camouflage.

The blanket’s hem trailed behind her as she hurried toward the next doorway. From within the hooded folds, she took one of the blanket’s counterparts, a catalytic heating patch. Squeezing the patch’s edge, she initiated the chemical reaction inside—she could feel it begin to warm in her palm—and set the processor-controlled temperature to match her own. She peeled away the tape guards and slapped the patch onto the doorway panel beside her. Down the length of the corridor, and into several of its branches, similar patches had already been stuck across all the sensors.

She heard him approaching. The sound of footsteps ringing through the enclosed spaces—that was a good sign. It showed that she had managed to push him even farther over the edge. Hören’s mounting anger was washing away before it all his stealth and hunter’s cunning. The substation had been a psychological extension of his own body, both a substance and an environment that he had controlled. The fight in the other sector, when he had used the diversion of the throat-mounted microphone to sneak up on her, had been the first blow to that armored self-image. Whatever physical harm he had suffered wasn’t as important as the eroding of his self-command. And now, to effectively blind him, rendering useless the sensors by which he had as much as seen into every corner of the substation . . . This ought to be good, thought Kira, as she rushed to get one more thermal patch up.

She ducked into the shadows of the nearest corridor branch, pulling the bottom of the silver blanket in behind her. The branch’s angle gave her a clear line of vision down the main corridor.

Hören appeared, knife in hand, his other arm hanging at his side. His shoulders hunched bull-like, chest laboring from exertion. He stepped forward, his glaring eyes scanning across the bulkheads.

Holding her breath, Kira watched as he stopped beside one of the doorways. He reached up, using the knife to poke at what he had spotted on the control panel. The blade slipped under the patch and lifted it away. Hören knelt down and rubbed the back of his fist across the patch lying on the deck, the heat still seeping from it. His face tautened as realization set in; the knife suddenly rose, then slashed the patch open, the chemicals spurting out.

That was what she had wanted. Hören strode down the corridor, teeth clenched in anger at the sight of the thermal patches fastened onto each doorway panel. He ripped one loose and flung it down, then the next.

As he came closer, Kira silently pulled the blanket from around her shoulders and held it ready before her. When her target crossed in front of the branch’s opening, she leapt forward, the blanket lifted like a net. Her momentum toppled Hören from his feet; she fell with him, the blanket’s folds billowing between them.

Even with just one arm, his strength surprised her. The knife point tore through the blanket, nearly grazing her ribs. She was thrown clear as Hören reared up. He tossed the blanket aside with another sweeping motion of his arm. Kira scrambled to her feet, crouching with hands forward in combat position.

Instead of coming at her, Hören scooped up the blanket and tossed it at her face. In the few seconds it took her to duck and push it away, Hören had turned and vanished into the opposite reaches of the corridor. She heard his footsteps dwindling away in the darkness.

She breathed deep, gathering her strength around her racing pulse. She had hoped for better, but still . . .

From this point on, it would be closer to a fair fight. She could deal with that.

CHAPTER 16

HE ACCEPTED ANOTHER DRINK, though he had already altered his metabolism so that it, and the ones preceding, would have no effect on him. The fresh synthale was set down in front of him, and the empty mug taken away.

Quark slid into the seat across the table from him. “Your health, Constable.” The Ferengi had picked up the term from hearing Commander Sisko use it. “You know your patronage is always most welcome in my humble establishment.”

“Is it, indeed?” The other’s sharp-toothed smile grated on Odo’s sensibilities to a greater degree than usual. His brooding about the situation on Ops, with everyone tensely waiting for any communication from the wormhole or the Gamma Quadrant, was not lightened by Quark’s impersonation of a charming host. “Don’t get ideas about what it means. I only come here because it makes a convenient vantage point for the comings and goings on the Promenade.”

“You’re too kind.” Nothing fazed Quark. “I seek to provide every amenity for my customers.” He leaned forward, the smile replaced by an expression of heartfelt solicitude. “Really too bad, isn’t it, about Major Kira and Doctor Bashir? I’d like to be counted among the many friends who are concerned about them.”

“What do you know about that?”

“My dear Odo. One hears things. As you yourself just indicated—this is a wonderful location for keeping an eye on things.” Quark gestured toward the other booths and tables, and the multi-species clientele lined up at the bar. “Really . . . it’s like the heart of DS Nine, don’t you agree?”

He made no reply. Once again, he was reluctantly impressed by the Ferengi’s network of informants, gossips, and other data conduits—a network that rivaled his own. A total security clampdown had been put in effect on the mission to the Gamma Quadrant, even before things had gone wrong. And here was Quark, making it a point to show that he was aware of the details. I should deputize him—the thought had occurred to Odo before. If I could trust him. At least, Quark wouldn’t be privy to any more sensitive material than he already was.

Odo took a drink and set the mug back down. “I hope I can rely on your discretion.”

“Oh, but of course.” Quark made a little bow where he sat. “And more than that, Constable. I want to help.”

“You’ll help by keeping your mouth shut.” He looked around to see if anyone else in the bar could overhear their conversation.

A sigh came from Quark. “I always encounter such hostility from you . . . and I don’t know why. Oh, well—” He started to slide from the booth. “Perhaps you’re just not interested. . . .”

Odo grabbed the Ferengi’s wrist and drew him back. “Do you think you have something to tell me that I don’t already know?”

“Your problem is that you think you know everything.” Quark adjusted his cuff. “Just because you can pass yourself off as a fly on the wall, if you want to. But you can’t be everywhere at once, can you? You certainly weren’t here on the Promenade when that Redemptorist Deyreth Elt was purchasing certain interesting items.”

“Those recording chips?” Odo shook his head in disgust; Quark was obviously beginning to slip. “You already gave me that tape.”

“Not the chips—anyone can buy those legally. I’m referring to a transaction that occurred right here in my bar, between Deyreth Elt and a pair of tech smugglers.”

“I see.” Odo’s interest had been aroused. “And were these smugglers friends of yours?”

“Well, they weren’t Ferengi, but they were certainly smart enough to make a little extra money by telling me what the Redemptorist had bought from them.” A smug expression settled on Quark’s face. “Most intriguing; lots of possibilities.”

“And these items were . . . ?”

“Constable. We’re both men of the universe.” Quark looked across the bar, then turned back to Odo. “If I satisfy your curiosity—what’s in it for me?”

“I thought you were so concerned about Kira and Bashir.”

“Oh, I am. Nearly as much as I am about myself.”

“Very well, then.” Odo shrugged. “You could expect a measure of forbearance on my part when it comes time to relicense your establishment. I’d be willing to overlook certain problems that have come to my attention, concerning the adulteration of beverages and irregularities in the operation of your dabo tables.”

“Thank you. I like a security chief I can do business with.” Quark drew a set of folded papers from inside his jacket. “Here’s the complete technical data on the items Deyreth Elt purchased. I don’t mean to insult you, but the information is somewhat specialized; it may be a little bit outside your realm of expertise. I suggest you consult with Chief Engineer O’Brien on this matter.”

He glanced through the sheets before refolding them. The Ferengi was right. “That’s exactly what I’ll do.” He drained the last of the synthale and stood up, then leaned over Quark. “If nothing else, he’ll be able to tell me whether or not you just pushed some worthless trash on me.”

“Constable!” Quark feigned shock. “I would never—”

“I know. Not unless there was a profit to be made from it.” Odo turned and headed for the exit.

“Have you changed your minds?”

The image regarded him with its eyes of blackness and stars. “That is not the correct word of your language. Our kind does not have minds as you would know them. It is something different.”

“Whatever.” Bashir resisted the temptation of getting into another protracted metaphysical discussion with the entity. It would have been so easy to do that, to forget all about matters of life and death in the universe outside. . . . He shook his head, as though struggling for a moment to stay focused, and laid his hands flat upon the arms of the pilot area’s seat. “Perhaps I should have asked if you had come to another decision.”

“We have not. The concern you feel for this other one of your kind, the one who exists here no more—we are intrigued by that. Your kind seeks to mold time, to make it different from what it is or will be; that is strange to us. But as you say, it is in your nature.” The image of Kira closed its eyes for a moment, silent, as it communed with the unseen others behind it. “Nevertheless, we cannot permit you to go to that other one. That which moves you from point to point, in space rather than time—this engine, as you call it—it wounds us terribly. We had not even known what pain and not-pain were, until such a thing came upon us. Now, we even know what death is; that is how severe the engine’s effects are upon our kind. All these things of time were brought to us by the one called Benjamin Sisko—but he also promised us that it would not be that way again. We accept that it was not your intent to harm us. But we cannot allow it to happen again.”

Bashir clenched his jaw in frustration. There was no telling what was going on with Kira, out in the Gamma Quadrant—he had reached the limit of how much good he could do her at this distance. He had received no communication from her in the last few hours; she could already be dead, for all he knew. Hören could have caught her as she was fetching the thermal patches and blanket from the storage cabinets. Caught her with an arm around her neck, and the knife rising up in his other hand—

He pushed the image out of his head. “If only . . . ” He shook his head. There was no way to explain to them.

There was no need to. The Kira image’s gaze penetrated his thoughts. “You do not believe us. In your mind and in your soul, you think we tell you something that is not truth.”

After a moment, Bashir nodded. “You’re right. That is what I think. There must be some way that I can activate the engine, and not have it hurt you. Or . . . or maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as you think; maybe you’re just afraid of it, because of the pain. It would be for only a little while, and then I would be out of the wormhole—”

“You see?” The harsh, angry voice came from the image again, its expression changing to a scowl. Bashir knew it wasn’t addressing him, but the rest of the wormhole’s inhabitants instead. “This also is in the nature of these creatures! The pain and death of others is not real to them—thus they find it easy to kill all not of their kind!”

“No . . . it’s not like that. . . .”

“These words are such clumsy things.” The gentler voice returned to Kira’s image. “Even for your own kind. It was the same with the one called Sisko—there were things he would not believe until he could see them himself. Perhaps it is the same for you. We should show you that of which we speak.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is not the only time that exists.” The image raised a hand toward the shuttle’s bulkheads. “All of what you see—both in this universe and the one outside it—that is but one time of many. There are others, different from this.”

He leaned forward in the seat. “You mean parallel realities? Something like that?”

“Words—your kind is so fond of them. You name things and believe you know them.” A smile played on the image’s face. “Yes, if it pleases you to call them such.”

“All right. What is it you would show me, then?” He felt like a character in an old Earth story, talking to the ghosts who had visited him. “I’m ready.”

More than ghostlike; a phantom of suffering. Suddenly, the image of Kira threw its head back, the cords of its neck tautening, mouth grimacing in pain. The image grew translucent; for a moment, the stars filled its outline, twined with bones of glass. Then it was gone.

He was alone in the cargo shuttle. More so than ever before; he realized that even when the image had chosen not to show itself to him, the wormhole’s inhabitants had always been there with him, watching. Their presence had filled the shuttle like oxygen. He could breathe, but the stuff inside his lungs was something colder and thinner, a bitter metallic taste formed on his tongue.

“Where are you?” Bashir called aloud, then slid down from the seat. He stood in the middle of the pilot area, looking slowly around the empty space.

Something else had stopped that had almost become as much a part of him as his pulse. He looked toward the panel that held the instruments for the external sensors. All the readouts had pegged down to zero, the same blank red numeral showing on all the gauges. He stepped toward the panel and laid his hand on it. The equipment was still working, a faint electronic hum seeped through the skin of his palm. The data storage units continued to operate, absorbing the flat output of the wormhole’s dead universe.

Appalled, Bashir stepped back from the readouts. He spun to face the pilot area’s center. “Where are you?” A cry now, as much of anger as fright.

We are not here. Not now. A soundless voice spoke at his ear. This is the place where we are not. Because of what you would do to us. We can look into this other time, and touch you in it, but we cannot be here.

He went to the front of the area, and leaned over the control panel, to gaze out the observation ports. The swirling play, the visible bands of the wormhole’s electromagnetic radiation, had vanished. Darkness without stars surrounded the shuttle.

“This . . . ” He touched the cold inner surface of the port. “This is what the engines would do?”

Without that which you call the buffers . . . yes. The wounding it causes, the hurt to us . . . the death. You would kill us with the engines. And when we die, the wormhole becomes a dead thing, as well. Its flesh is our flesh; we are the same as it. It would not happen at once, but slowly in your time. Whenever the engines come upon us, a little more death. Until there is no more.

There was something else they weren’t telling him; he sensed it, out beyond the fragile skin of the shuttle, beyond the limits of the wormhole itself.

“What about the rest? Out there?” He pointed to where the stars had once been, cold light swarming at the point where this small universe opened onto the larger one. “What happens there?”

We know not. The voice seemed to come from a place almost as distant. That is not our concern.

An idea had already formed inside him; all he needed to do was speak it aloud. Even though he was afraid to.

“Leave me here, then.” Bashir looked over his shoulder, half hoping to see the Kira image standing behind him. “In this time, in this place.”

This is the time of the dead.

“I know. But I can do you no more harm here. Your kind exists in another time, apart from this. I can activate the engine without causing any more suffering, any more death, to you. We’re all beyond that, here, in this time. There would be no more wounding, yet I could go to the aid of the other one of my kind. That’s all that matters to me now.”

The voice was silent for a long moment. Then it came again. You do this at peril to yourself. We cannot tell you what lies beyond this place, this time, our flesh. We are not out there, where you wish to go. You will cease to exist for us, as the other one did. You will have no way of speaking to us again.

He nodded slowly. “But there’s no other way.”

You will be lost.

“I’ll have to take that chance. But like everything else out there—it won’t be your concern anymore.” He shrugged. “Maybe you won’t even remember me.”

Too late. Now, you exist in memory, as well.

“All right.” Bashir pushed himself away from the panel and stood in the center of the pilot area. “Let’s do it.”

It is done already. The voice was barely perceptible. Goodbye . . .

He was truly alone. The instrument gauges stared at him like empty eye sockets. He walked past them, heading for the hatchway that led down to the engine compartment.

A few minutes later—if time could have been measured in this universe—he came back up and settled himself in the pilot area’s chair. He reached out and pressed the main thrust control. Below him, he felt the surge of power emitted by the unbuffered engine.

Gathering speed, the cargo shuttle moved toward the wormhole’s exit.

“I’ve brought someone with me this time.” He pulled another chair toward the table in the center of the cell. “I think you know our Chief Engineer O’Brien.”

Odo watched as the Redemptorists, sitting in a row on the other side of the table, nodded toward their former boss. They all looked puzzled as to why he had come.

“The chief engineer and I have been having an interesting conversation.” Odo unfolded the papers that Quark had given him and spread them out on the table. “Much the same as you and I have had. Only concerning things that I wasn’t quite aware of before.”

The Redemptorists shifted in their chairs, appearing nervous and uncomfortable. He had observed this condition in interrogation subjects before, especially after they had—had time to reflect upon various psychological ploys he might have used upon them. This bunch now radiated an uneasy fear when confronted by him, undoubtedly worrying—if only subconsciously—about what he might turn to next.

“It seems certain devices were purchased by your late comrade Deyreth Elt.” Odo looked down at the sheets of paper. “Devices that the chief engineer informs me are called parasitic echo relays.” He looked up at his audience. “Ring any bells with you?”

The Redemptorists glanced from the corners of their eyes at one another, but remained silent.

“These devices have some striking properties. It was an education, hearing about them. It seems that these echo relays can be placed in parallel with circuits that might have a coded signal sent along them—the input circuits, let us say, for a chain of high explosives that requires a fuse code in order to be triggered.” Odo looked at O’Brien sitting next to him. He sensed the hot-tempered human’s impatience with what must have seemed like a roundabout mode of questioning. The engineer would have been much more likely to have reached across the table and banged a couple of heads together to get them talking. Even if he hadn’t gotten any answers that way, he would have felt better. “These echo relays don’t require the code signal; they can pick it up from the circuits they’ve been placed on, and hold it for a variable length of time before allowing it to pass on to the next stage of the circuit. Now, does that sound familiar?”

They were trembling, right at the verge of cracking; Odo saw one of the Redemptorists open his mouth, as though he were about to speak. Sweat dotted all their brows. The softening up he had done before was about to pay off. To confront them now, with a spiel of information that they had thought was known only to themselves, was the final step in the process.

“Come on,” growled O’Brien. “There’s people’s lives at stake—”

The Redemptorists didn’t even seem to hear the chief engineer. They were still staring at Odo, like small animals hypnotized by a venomous reptile.

“You know you want to tell me.” He pitched his voice low, almost soothing. “Think how good it will make you feel. Why not now?”

“It’s so they won’t all go off at once—” The one in the center of the row broke his silence, his words blurting out, propelled by the pressure inside him. “And that way—”

“That’s right,” another one quickly added. “So the force isn’t cumulative, it’s dispersed—”

They all began talking at once, their voices tumbling over each other.

Odo turned toward O’Brien. “Are you getting all this?”

She swiveled her chair toward him. “There have been some highly unusual developments in that sector, Commander.”

Sisko stood behind Dax on the Ops deck, looking at the panel display she had called him to see. “Exactly what’s going on?”

Dax ran a fingertip across the glowing numerals. “I’ve been keeping a monitoring scan on the sector where the entrance to the wormhole was before it collapsed out of existence. Look at this.” The numbers she pointed to were rows of zeros. “There’s been a near-total drop in the background electromagnetic activity. Virtually nothing is happening in that sector. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

He felt his brow creasing in puzzlement. “What do you think it means?”

“Hard to tell, Commander.” She studied the readouts. “It’s as if that sector has shifted in time somehow—to a point approaching the theoretical end of the universe itself. This flattening out of the EM distribution is a kind of death on a cosmological scale. It’s what we would anticipate seeing—if there were anyone still around to see it—when the universe begins collapsing in upon itself. It’s just that here it’s confined to this one relatively small area.”

“Something must be going on in there. Inside the wormhole.”

Dax nodded. “That sector of space and the wormhole must somehow still be connected—just as if the wormhole left a gap in the outside universe’s fabric when it disappeared. And now we’re seeing some kind of resonance effect between them.”

“It’s Bashir.” One of Sisko’s fists struck the panel. “He must have done something. He must have figured out some way of dealing with the wormhole’s inhabitants.”

“Perhaps. But then, the wormhole’s entrance hasn’t reappeared.”

“Commander—” A voice called from the Ops doorway. He looked up and saw Odo and O’Brien striding toward him.

“What is it, gentlemen?”

“My interrogation of the Redemptorists has yielded some results at last.” Odo appeared pleased with himself. “We’ve come up with some information that may be of considerable value.”

“It’s just as we thought,” said O’Brien. “They’ve wired some additional surprises into the substation.”

Sisko led them back to his office. He leaned forward across his desk, chin braced against his fists, and listened to the chief engineer’s explanation.

“—and that’s what they’ve cooked up.” O’Brien had finished the technical details. “These parasitic echo relays turn the autodestruct function of the original quarantine module into something almost completely different. The original destruct sequence was set for all the explosives to go off simultaneously, as soon as the fuse codes were transmitted to them. That way, the QM would have been completely destroyed; there wouldn’t have been any pieces bigger than your hand floating around afterward. Now, with these echo delays wired into the circuits aboard the substation, they will go off one after another, with several seconds between charges. The cumulative effect won’t be present; all the substation’s atmospheric seals will be blown out, but the structural framework and most of the exterior shielding will still be intact.”

“Apparently, the plan was something devised by Deyreth Elt and Hören Rygis.” Odo turned his gaze toward the commander. “They anticipated that once we discovered Hören was aboard the substation—particularly if we also found out that he had been successful in murdering Major Kira—we would initiate the autodestruct sequence as the quickest means of eradicating him, so that he couldn’t be brought to trial on Bajor. He couldn’t eliminate the explosives and their circuitry on the substation, but with the echo relays they could be sufficiently altered so that he would stand a reasonable chance of survival. With one of the portable emergency life-support systems aboard, he could hold out for some time. Long enough for the Bajoran provisional government to become aware of the situation and press for him to be brought back to the planet’s surface. Any trial would become a show for gathering even more support for the Redemptorist cause. Hören would come out of it an even bigger hero than before.”

“Indeed.” Sisko leaned back. “Now that we have this information, gentlemen, what do we do with it?”

“If we could get this information to Major Kira, she could use it against Hören.” Odo’s voice remained dispassionately logical. “We know that the other end of the wormhole is still in existence; it’s also reasonable to assume that the cargo shuttle is still close to the wormhole’s exit. Though the internal curvature of the wormhole normally renders impossible any transmissions to or from vessels that have traveled significant distances inside, the cargo shuttle might be within effective comm range. If so, there’s a chance that Kira is in contact with Doctor Bashir. He could transmit to her the fuse codes for the explosives. As soon as she had acquired a portable life-support system for herself, she could initiate the autodestruct sequence and blow Hören into space. An entirely appropriate conclusion to him, I would maintain.”

“The problem is in getting the information to her.” Sisko rubbed his chin. “I think we need to have another little discussion with Gul Tahgla. . . .”

He used the augmented personnel module to transfer from the cargo shuttle to the substation. The APM, stowed in its own bay just off the shuttle’s freight hold, was almost a complete small spacecraft in its own right, nearly two meters across at its widest point and close to four meters from the base of its propulsion unit to the signal lights and sensors mounted above the multiwindowed head. The six utility arms positioned around the APM’s elongated trapezoidal form were equipped with a variety of tools, from heavy-duty grappling pincers to fusion weld cutters. Bashir didn’t know what it would take to get inside the substation, but he wanted to be prepared for any eventuality.

The safety of the cargo shuttle dwindled behind as he steered the APM toward the substation’s docking port, where it had once been connected to the vessel taking it through the wormhole. In all directions lay the field of stars, the coldness of their scattered light prickling Bashir’s skin. The memory of the Kira image’s eyes haunted him; that, and the dead pocket universe, the wormhole wounded by the unbuffered engines, from which he had finally piloted the shuttle.

Around the docking port were the black scorch marks from the bomblets that had originally cannoned the substation out here to the Gamma Quadrant. Inside the APM, Bashir rotated a control on the small panel before him, playing an exterior work light across the massive C-shaped arms splayed out from the port. Reaching behind him in the APM’s cramped space, he found the glovelike hand-piece that operated the smaller grappling arm. The APM turned on its axis as the arm extended and seized hold of the port’s emergency release bolts.

He breathed a sigh of relief when the bolts gave way, the grappling arm slowly twisting them to their unlocked position. The explosive force of the bomblets hadn’t damaged the entry system. He had been worried about the possible need to cut his way in with the fusion torch, and compromise the substation’s atmospheric seals.

Backing the APM off a few meters, he watched the hexagonal door of the port swing open. Within minutes, he had guided the APM inside; using one of the grappling arms, he struck the red manual-activate switch protruding from the side of the airlock. Through the APM’s sensors, he could hear the hissing sound grow louder as oxygen flooded the chamber. As soon as the pressure-match light came on on the panel, he unsealed the APM—a vertical slit appeared between two of the segmented windows, widening as the metal edges retracted from each other, down to the APM’s base. Bashir quickly stepped out and hurried to the doorway leading to the interior of the substation.

In the central corridor, with the door sliding shut behind him, caution suddenly held him back. There was no telling where Horen might be—the Redemptorist would undoubtedly have been able to tell that someone new had come aboard. Bashir resisted the impulse to call out Kira’s name, and instead, tried to make as little noise as possible as he headed for the command center.

He found he needn’t have worried.

When the command center’s door slid back, he spotted the two corpses lying on the deck. Or what had been corpses; slow centuries had reduced them to skeletons, the soft tissues reduced to a thin, wrinkled leather.

The larger one he assumed had been Hören; the other, he was able to recognize as Kira from the few faded scraps of her uniform, the white fingers of her ribs visible through the gaps. The skull’s eye sockets held nothing as they gazed up at the ceiling.

He knelt down and touched what had been her head. The small bones crumbled to dust with the slightest pressure.

Cold, deeper than that between the stars, seemed to radiate from inside him. He quickly stepped to the control panels; the instrument lights came up, slowly and dimly, beneath his fingertips. “DS Nine—this is the substation mission calling Deep Space Nine. Do you read me?” He could hear his own voice tautening, as dread seized hold of his throat and breath. “Is there anyone there? Anyone . . . ”

Silence answered him. Silence that he knew now was the wordless speech of the dead, an emptiness large enough to swallow galaxies, small enough to be held inside jaws of whitening bone. He stepped back from the panel and turned toward the dead, who still had remnants of faces.

“They have been here a long time. Just like this. Waiting for you.”

Somehow, the unexpected voice failed to startle him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a woman standing behind him. She was dressed in the enfolding robes of a Bajoran priestess.

“There is no blame to be ascribed to you.” The woman’s expression was one of gentle forgiveness. “As I told your commander, Benjamin Sisko, there are limits to human effort. One must learn to accept what one can and cannot do.”

He recognized her then. He had never met the Kai Opaka in the flesh—though she seemed real enough now, standing with placid calm in the substation’s command center—but had seen photos and tapes of her, millennia ago back on DS9. Her soft voice confirmed her identity.

Slowly, Bashir stood up and turned toward her. After so much that had happened, his capacity for being surprised had been erased. But not the questions inside his head. “What is this place?”

“This?” Kai Opaka lifted her small hand and gestured toward the substation’s bulkheads, then toward the observation ports to indicate the stars beyond. “This is everything, Doctor Bashir. This is the universe, the one to which the inhabitants of the wormhole brought you—at your request, remember. The universe you remember—the universe of living things—exists, and doesn’t exist, somewhere else. You have left all that behind.”

“Are we . . . ”

She read his thought. “We are the only living things here. And everywhere. This is the universe of the dead.” She pointed to the observation ports. “Go and see for yourself, Doctor.”

He stepped toward the ports and looked out. At the stars and the worlds hidden in the darkness between them. His skin felt cold, as though the hollow in his gut was a piece of the same vacuum.

“Do you not sense it?” The Kai’s voice came from behind him. “Or rather, you do not sense it. That which was as familiar to you as your breath, so much a part of you that it could be forgotten. The sense of being surrounded by a living organism, the universe itself. That is what you miss now.”

“Yes. . . .” He nodded slowly. “That . . . that’s all gone. Everything. . . .” He turned away from the empty vision. “It was the wounding, wasn’t it? That did this. They told me . . . about the suffering, and the death. . . .”

“Of course. Are you not a doctor? Did you not know that one part of a living thing is connected to all other parts? Even the wormhole, as separate as it is, still is of that greater substance. By wounding it, by its death, the death of all was brought about. It could not be otherwise.”

He had known the answer even before she had spoken. The weight of the dead universe seemed to crush the breath from his lungs, as though he were being buried in a lightless grave.

“I know how I got here . . . ” Bashir spoke, hoping to keep the human presence of the Kai near him for a while longer. “But what about you?”

She smiled. “I am only, as you might say, a little bit in this place. Though I exist in the universe of the living, the one from which you came, my meditations long ago brought me to this one, as well. On your world, as well as Bajor, the highest wisdom is to be as mindful of death as one is of life. These are not empty words; if you were to devote yourself to the raising of one’s inner powers as I have, you would also be able to exist in both universes at once. Thus it is that the prophets see the future as clearly as the present, and the sages know that all things happen in timelessness as well as in time.” Kai Opaka stretched her palm toward him, as though in blessing. “I saw that you had come to this place, by virtue of your concern for another. What you lack in wisdom—what you have not within you yet—is equaled by that sacrifice. I could not let you suffer alone.”

A spark of hope moved inside Bashir. “Can you . . . can you take me back? To the living?”

“That is not within my abilities. But those who are more powerful than I am, those who were created of timelessness—the ones who brought you here—they can do that. And they will. You chose not to harm them, and they are grateful for that.”

He closed his eyes, feeling the weariness drain away from him. “But when . . . ”

I have already communicated with them. It is as much as done.

The Kai’s voice hadn’t spoken aloud, but inside him. As he opened his eyes, he turned toward the observation ports.

And saw the stars. And felt, resonating with his own pulse and breath, the living worlds turning beneath every sun. . . .

He looked over his shoulder and saw that Kai Opaka had gone. But he wasn’t alone.

There was only one form lying on the command center’s deck. And she was alive.

He stepped toward Kira and reached down, taking her by the arm and pulling her to her feet. She blinked in confusion, as though she were still mired in the troubled dreams into which she had fallen.

CHAPTER 17

“ARE YOU SURE that’s all you require, Commander?” The Cardassian’s face peered from the Ops screen. “I expected something rather more . . . elaborate from you.”

Sisko gave a brief nod, a simulation of courtesy. “As I’ve tried to explain to you, Gul Tahgla, it’s really a very simple matter. And while I admit a degree of embarrassment about the glitch that’s interrupted our communications with our substation, I suppose I should also be grateful that your services are available to help us out.”

Behind his chair, his chief officers stood and watched, listening to the interchange between their commander and his counterpart out in the Gamma Quadrant. A brief conference between him and the others had been enough to formulate their strategy. Now, all he had to do was get Gul Tahgla to fall for it.

“I’m not quite sure about this. . . .” Suspicion clouded Gul Tahgla’s face. He studied the panel before him, drawing a finger along the words that one of his adjutants had written down for him. “Let me see if I have this correct. The text of the message you would like me to relay to your substation is ‘That which would have been simultaneous will now be sequential.’” He glanced up. “And that’s it?”

“That’s all of it.” Sisko smiled pleasantly. “I tried to be brief; I didn’t want to put you and your crew to any more trouble than absolutely necessary.”

“It sounds rather like a—what is that amusement of words?—a riddle.” Gul Tahgla tilted his head, as though he could better puzzle out the meaning by viewing the message at a different angle. “Are you sure the ones aboard your substation—if there are any alive, of course—will understand such compression? Perhaps you would like to . . . expand on it just a bit?” He looked up, as though hoping for a clue.

“No, it’s quite adequate the way it is.” Sisko hoped it was. The wording was of his own devising, intended to be just enough to serve as a key for Kira and Bashir, so that they would be able to figure out the rest on their own. And at the same time, it had to remain impenetrable to Gul Tahgla, hiding the status of the substation. “My crew members will know what it means.”

“Commander Sisko.” The expression on Tahgla’s face had hardened, his eyes narrowing. “I must tell you that I find this artful simplicity to be most dubious. I sense not just mockery here but a very real threat. The mistrust your request evokes is grave. My officers and I will have to study this intended message, to make certain it’s harmless.”

“Now that is disappointing. I expected better of you, Gul Tahgla. Are you telling me that a Cardassian gul can’t make a decision on his own, over something as simple as this? You might want to be concerned about the damage that will be done to the reputation of yourself and all the Cardassian officer corps, when the story gets out that you were frightened by something that’s hardly more than a fragment from a children’s game. Entities across the known galaxies might speculate as to whether the warriors of the great Cardassian empire worry about their own shadows creeping up on them.” Sisko could see that his comments were hitting home, from the smoldering look that creased Gul Tahgla’s brow. “And then, there are the political repercussions to consider, when it’s determined that my message was in fact harmless to Cardassian interests—and you personally refused to honor traditional standards of conduct between nonwarring parties. I’m sure many planets with whom you have alliances could begin to wonder what your empire’s true relationship with them might be. That’s the kind of suspicion that would set back your diplomatic efforts a great deal.” Sisko shrugged. “Of course, you might not be concerned about what your superiors on the council would say about your placing them in such an awkward position . . . all over a simple little riddle . . . ”

“Very well.” Gul Tahgla’s mouth twisted into a snarl. “Your message will be transmitted to your substation unit; we will continue to repeat until such time as you are satisfied that we have made every effort to accommodate you. But I warn you, Sisko: this changes nothing. I will sweep your abandoned unit out of the sector surrounding the wormhole’s exit.” He nodded in his own mockery of civility. “Perhaps I will find the answer to your inane riddle in the pieces that are left when I’m done.”

The screen went blank, the subspace link with the Cardassian vessel broken.

Sisko looked over his shoulder at his chief officers. “He bought it.”

A fire burst the bounds of his heart, swarming upward into the chambers that had once held rational thought. That had all been torn away by the rage that both consumed and left him whole. Stronger and purer than before; that was what pain and anger had done for him. There had been weakness before in his physical body, the frail bone and flesh that held his spirit. But his own poisoned blood had been let, and now he felt himself glorified, a wrathful spirit of justice.

Hören moved through the corridors of the substation, the vibration of each step sending a jagged spear up into his shoulder. His broken arm dangled at his side, its angle twisted even sharper than at first. That was good; the crying of the nerves within kept him alert, his senses scanning at a fevered pitch across the darkness.

His other hand gripped the knife, tight enough that it had become an extension of his thought and will. Its glittering edge turned radiant inside his skull; he could picture the thin metal sinking through flesh as easily as through air itself. As though his prey were a ghost, a dead thing already. For so it had been ordained. His own voice howled wordlessly inside him, a prophecy that he carried in his fist. . . .

The gridded deck rose unevenly beneath him, and he stumbled. He found himself on his knees and one hand, his knuckles scraped raw between the knife’s handle and the floor. The darkness swam up toward his face, as though it were a pool that he could ease his burning face into and drink deep.

Part of him, the weak and diseased part, wanted to curl onto his side and find sleep, let dreams roll over him, let the darkness become an ocean swaying him in its slow tides. He could have wept in frustration, in the bitterness of knowing that the blood always returned, that he had to let more and more of it out. To sanctify himself.

“It’s her fault,” he whispered. It always had been. The fire had blossomed inside the temple; the lucky ones who had been confirmed in their holiness had lain on the blackened ground, alive just long enough to taste the sweetness of their perfected state. He should have been there with them; he would have been, if she hadn’t cheated him of that moment of grace. A timeless moment, eternal, all weakness purged. Then, perhaps they would have forgiven, and blessed him.

He pushed himself up from the deck, sitting back on his haunches. His strength began to return as he concentrated on taking one breath after another. The pain from his broken arm dulled a fraction, as though it were a partner in his great task and had recognized how much farther they had to go.

Carefully, Hören got to his feet, resting his shoulder for a moment against the bulkhead. The strength grew in him, the purifying flames leaping even higher. He raised his good arm, looked at his haggard face in the knife blade above.

Soon. That was the vow he sealed upon his heart. It was time to bring everything to an end.

He stepped away from the bulkhead, moving on his ordained course. Toward her.

She had been so angry that she had almost torn his head off. When she regained full consciousness and understood that it wasn’t a hallucination generated by fatigue, but the actual physical form of Julian Bashir standing in the substation’s command center, she pulled her arm away as he was examining the bloodsoaked dressing.

“I ordered you!” The words had snapped from Kira’s mouth. “You were absolutely forbidden to activate any unbuffered engine and cause any further damage to the wormhole—”

“You know, I really expected a more cordial welcome than this. It wasn’t easy getting here.”

Bashir had had to show her, by a visual check through the observation ports and the readouts from the monitoring instruments, that the wormhole was still in existence. “This end of it, at least.” He had tapped his finger against one of the gauges. “Until we get back on board the cargo shuttle and establish a subspace comm link with DS Nine, there’s no telling what’s going on back there.”

She studied him with equal measures of puzzlement and mistrust. “So, exactly how did you get here?”

“Those minor details will be in my report.” He smiled. “They have somewhat more to do with my area of expertise than yours, I’m afraid.” He paused, listening to the substation’s silence for a moment before turning back to her. “What about Hören? Is he still—”

Kira nodded. “He’s still out there . . . somewhere.” She gestured toward the command center’s doorway. “He could be just outside in the corridor, listening to us, for all we know.”

“And he’s still intent on killing you?”

“He’s somewhat persistent,” she said dryly. “Let’s just say I’ve had a few encounters with him. That’ll all be in my report.”

“Then, what we need to do is transfer back to the cargo shuttle—right now. Where he can’t get at either one of us.” Bashir glanced at the doorway. “We can use the augmented personnel module—it can hold two people if necessary. It’ll be tight, but then, we don’t have far to go.”

“Negative on that.” She shook her head. “You can go back to the shuttle if you want. But I’m not leaving the substation. Not until he’s taken care of.”

“Are you joking?” Bashir stared at her. “Why take the risk?” He pointed to her bandaged arm and bloodstained uniform. “You’ve already barely survived your ‘encounters’ with this maniac. In the shuttle, we could just wait him out. Or at least, we’d have time to rest and think about what we’re going to do.” He tilted his head back, realization dawning on him. “Perhaps you don’t want to leave the substation because you’ve become as obsessed as he is. Some of Hören’s madness has rubbed off on you. So, now you’re locked into this . . . this dance with him.”

“It’s not a matter of obsession.” Kira’s voice remained controlled. “I was sent out here to the Gamma Quadrant on a specific mission, to claim sovereignty over this sector surrounding the wormhole’s exit. Before the Cardassians are able to. This substation has to represent the legal basis for that claim. If Gul Tahgla gets here and discovers there’s no one aboard except some homicidal lunatic roaming the corridors with a knife, he’ll be able to lock down a claim for Cardassian sovereignty even tighter.” She pushed her disordered hair back from her brow. “There’s too much at stake—not just for the Federation but for Bajor—for me to let that happen.”

“The claim of sovereignty won’t hold up if Gul Tahgla finds nothing but corpses here, yours included.”

“All right, then.” Kira shrugged. “As I said, I’m going to stay here and take care of Hören.”

“Kill him, you mean.”

“If I have to.”

Bashir gazed up at the ceiling. The exasperation he felt over her stubbornness was made worse by his knowing that she was right.

“You’re in charge, Major.” He knew when he was beaten. “Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I intend to disobey any order you might give for me to return to the shuttle. Until we’re done here. Between the two of us, we should be able to handle Hören.”

One side of Kira’s mouth lifted in a smile. At the same time, from the corner of his eye, Bashir saw a light appear on one of the command center’s panels.

“We’ve got a transmission coming in.” He studied the words scrolling on the comm link’s readout. “It’s from Gul Tahgla’s vessel.”

He switched the link onto the overhead speaker. A monotone Cardassian voice sounded.

“This message is relayed by us from the Deep Space Nine station, its point of origin. Your commander, Benjamin Sisko, wishes to advise you, verbatim quote: That which would have been simultaneous will now be sequential. End of transmission. Do you acknowledge?”

Bashir pressed another of the switches. “Receipt acknowledged.” The lights on the panel died as the comm link was broken. “What the hell do you think that was supposed to mean?”

“If Sisko wanted us to hear, it has to mean something.” Kira stood beside him. “Especially if he went to the effort of convincing Gul Tahgla to relay it to us.” She turned toward Bashir. “My guess would be that it refers to some operating mode of the substation. Think—is there any onboard function that was originally designed to operate simultaneously?”

“Well, there are the standard life-support systems . . . but those are ongoing.” He rubbed his chin. “The message seemed to indicate something that hasn’t started up yet . . . something that would have to be triggered—” His eyes widened. “The autodestruct devices! Of course—the charges are set to explode all at the same time, when the fuse codes are programmed into them, so that the combined force would be enough to tear the substation apart.”

“So if they went off in a delayed sequence instead . . . ”

“It must have been something those Redemptorists wired in, when they were working to convert the quarantine module. If O’Brien were here, he could probably explain how they did it.”

“What would the effect be?”

Bashir shrugged. “The damage would still be pretty severe. The interior of the substation would be essentially gutted, the atmospheric seals would be blown out. Structurally, it would remain intact; most of the explosive force would be directed inward, so the exterior would still be in decent enough shape.”

“Total loss of life aboard?”

“Sure—for anybody who wasn’t protected. The decompression alone would be sufficiently lethal.”

“Then that’s it.” Kira squeezed her hand into a fist. “That’s what Sisko wanted us to know. It’s the perfect means of taking care of Hören.”

“It’s still chancy. He’d have to be lured to a sector of the substation that doesn’t have any emergency life-support systems stocked in it. The only section like that is the anterior storage lockers.” Bashir drew in a long breath through his teeth. “And that’s the end of the explosives chain—that’s exactly where the charges would start going off, once the codes had been given from here.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Kira wiped her palms on the trousers of her uniform. “That’s my job. . . .”

He saw her. In some ways, it was easier now that he wasn’t relying on the doorway sensors and the tracking device. Hören could tell where she was, her movements through the substation’s corridors, just by sniffing the trapped air. His senses had grown sharper, the purifying anger strengthening him.

A shadow in darkness, a footstep that rang upon metal . . . that was enough. His prey was moving toward the farther reaches of the substation, away from the command center. He had thought he would be able to trap her there, but she had bolted from that false security. Panic must have set in, a desperate hunt for some kind of hiding place. He had survived her trap, clever as it had been; perhaps she had realized at last that there would be no stopping him, that he would keep coming toward her, implacable. There would be no hiding places where he could not find her. And at the end, she would be caught in some corner, a narrow angle of bulkheads and ceiling. Then his shadow would fall upon her, a darkness broken only by the shining of justice in his upraised hand.

He moved through the corridors that had become as familiar to him as his own body. All around, he felt the sureness of time embrace him, the fulfillment of prophecy.

“Hören!”

Her shout rang through the dimly lit spaces, echoing from the banks of storage lockers surrounding her.

A silhouette, its shoulders made even more massive by the lowering of his head, appeared in the doorway. One arm dangled, twisted and useless, at the figure’s side. The knife glittered in the other hand.

“I’ve been waiting for this, Kira.” He stepped forward, a trace of light revealing the hollows of his face. “For centuries . . . ”

“I know you have.” She moved sideways, slowly, along the bulkhead behind her. Even in his madness, which had stripped away so much of him, there was still something of the Redemptorist leader remaining. His voice, the thundering pronouncements of blood and fire. She had counted on that. “It was ordained, wasn’t it?”

“Now is not the time to mock me. You blaspheme in addition to all your other sins. Better that you should repent and seek forgiveness.”

She glanced from the corner of her eye at the narrowing space to one side. “Would that change anything?” There was another doorway leading out of the area, a few meters away; almost as close to her as Hören.

“Of course not.” His eyes glinted like sparks of the same radiance that ran along the knife blade. “There are sins that lie upon your heart, that are beyond forgiving. They can only be purged, like a sickness in your veins.” He raised the bright metal. “That is why you should welcome this release from your life of defilement.”

She said nothing. For a moment, she braced her hands flat against the bulkhead. He had come near enough for her to smell the acrid sweat that had seeped through his skin.

Close enough to smell her own blood staining the blade . . .

Kira leapt shoulder-first as the knife swung toward her, ducking beneath its arc. Diving for the open doorway, she landed on her side, then reached up to hit the control panel. As Hören loomed in the shrinking gap, the thrust of her kick caught him in the abdomen, staggering him backward. The door’s edge sealed shut.

“Bashir—” She slapped her comm badge. “Initiate explosives sequence now!”

His voice came through an overhead speaker. “Are you sure?”

“Goddamn it! Of course I’m sure—do it!” She scrambled to her feet and headed toward the passageway’s end.

She heard the door sliding open behind her, and Hören’s footsteps. As she glanced over her shoulder, another sound erupted, a deep rumble. The shock wave from the explosion hit, the corridor shaking on all sides, throwing her from her feet. She grabbed hold of a doorway frame and pulled herself upright, bracing herself against the bulkhead. Behind her, she saw Hören on his knees, raising himself with the knife still in his hand.

Another explosion; the air began to stream past her face. She pushed herself away from the door and ran, as the deck jarred and buckled beneath her.

He heard the sounds, the low bass notes vibrating through the substation’s frame. Immediately, the alarms went off on the command center’s panels, signaling the loss of perimeter integrity. Bashir punched the controls to dump the reserve oxygen storage and bring on-line the emergency atmospheric generators. His ears popped with the fall in pressure, partly muting the alarm sirens as he opened the doorway into the central corridor.

There was no time now to worry about Kira; he could only follow his part in what they had planned together. In a few minutes, he had reached the airlock and climbed into the augmented personnel module. The opening narrowed into a thin slit, then disappeared as the metal edges locked into each other.

With the maneuvering jets set at low thrust, Bashir inched the APM forward. The doorway to the interior of the substation was meters too small for the APM to pass through. He activated the fusion weld torch, the tip of the articulated metal arm turning into a glowing white point of energy. With the largest of the grappling arms, he grabbed hold of the doorway frame, bending it free as the torch cut through the structural member behind.

He could feel the heat through the segmented windows; that and the seconds ticking past brought sweat trickling down into his eyes. The walls of the airlock shook as another explosion went off, closer this time. He pulled back on the grappling arm’s control, the metal tearing like heavy paper.

The explosions, the blasts that had surged louder and louder, the impacts throwing her against the bulkheads, had confused her. She had had her route to the airlock figured out and memorized, but it had been knocked from her skull.

Kira stopped, her lungs straining in the thin atmosphere. The draft had grown stronger, rushing past her ears as more oxygen poured out from the substation’s ruptured seals. The wailing alarm sirens seemed to come from kilometers away.

She looked toward the end of the corridor and saw a dead end. No, she told herself. To the left at the last branch, not right . . . you’re almost there. . . .

Turning, she could see past the junction of the main corridor, to the airlock’s doorway. Metal glowed and screeched, as the APM beyond battered its way through the jagged opening. Bashir’s face was just visible inside the machine.

Go. . . .

She staggered toward the airlock. The deck rose up and twisted, slamming her shoulder against the bulkhead. She managed to keep her balance, but thought for a moment that the impact had blinded her. She couldn’t see the airlock’s opening anymore; a wave of darkness had risen above her.

Then she saw the light cut through, the gleam of metal. And knew that he had found her.

“Kira . . . ”

Hören could manage no more than a ragged gasp, his own chest heaving as his arm grasped round her shoulders, drawing her to him. The knife came up under her jaw, forcing her head back.

“I’ve waited . . . ” She could barely hear him through the roaring wind. “For so long . . . ”

The sound of metal ripping apart, distant as another world; she looked past Hören and saw the APM burst into the passageway, the jagged tooth of the broken doorway frame scraping a line down the armored shape. The jets at the APM’s base flared brighter as it moved through the clearance between the bulkheads.

Another explosion, from what seemed only a few meters away; the air was pulled from Kira’s mouth as she fell. The blow had torn Hören’s grasp away; he toppled beside her.

A shape loomed over her. The metal carapace of the APM split open, revealing Bashir at its controls. He reached down and grabbed the collar of her uniform, dragging her onto her feet and toward him. He shouted something, but she couldn’t hear what words came from his mouth.

With his other hand, Bashir pushed against another control; the APM rolled a few degrees, enough to lift Kira and let her fall inside. She landed heavily against Bashir’s chest.

“Now, we’re getting out of here—” He punched one of the switches, and the opening’s metal edges moved toward each other.

Weariness claimed her; she felt herself collapsing, only the confines of the narrow space keeping her upright. She twisted about, watching the gap slide shut. The opening suddenly seemed to disappear, filled by darkness. And a face with maddened eyes.

His face.

A hand reached through and caught the front of her uniform, gathering the torn fabric into its fist, dragging her toward him. The edges closed on Hören’s wrist as she braced her hands against the metal.

Light flared from the end of the corridor, in sync with the force that surged through the substation’s frame. A silent torrent pulled taut the muscles of Hören’s face as the last of the oxygen rushed out, the tatters of cloth around his chest and arms streaming into ragged pennants.

A warning light blinked on the APM’s panel, as its air supply was sucked keening through the broken seal of the opening. Bashir brought up the thrust of the forward maneuvering jets, backing the APM toward the airlock.

Hören’s fist stayed locked upon Kira, the white-knuckled fingers curving into claws, the nails sinking through and into the palm. The streaming air drew the rivulets of blood along the tendons of his forearm.

She grabbed the inside brace of the opening, her fingers catching at a thin metal ridge. Gasping for breath, she added the last reserves of her strength to that of the machine.

Bone cracked and splintered through flesh. The metal edges ground through the last shreds of tissue. The opening sealed shut as a wet thing loosed its grasp and slid away.

She had only a last glimpse of Hören, his face contorted beyond rage. With his broken arm hooked around a jet nozzle, he clung to the exterior of the APM, his bloodied stump raised to batter against one of the windows.

The last explosion hit. The corridor erupted around the machine. Bashir had already worked the APM through the torn entrance of the airlock; the impact of the explosion tumbled it through the chamber . . .

And out.

To silence.

They drifted, the substation slowly turning and growing smaller against the stars.

The curved space of the APM fit tightly around its two occupants. She couldn’t have pressed any closer to Bashir if she’d wanted to.

“I know it will be difficult—” He didn’t turn his face toward her, but kept watching as he maneuvered the APM toward the shuttle, “But if you try not to get too excited, I think we have just enough oxygen left to get there.”

CHAPTER 18

A SUBSTANTIAL INCREASE in communications traffic was noted.

The pitch and volume of Gul Tahgla’s shouted words alone would have required an expanded bandwidth. As his voice came out of the overhead speaker, Bashir wished that it would have been possible to view him, as well.

“What is the meaning of this—”

Kira handled the comm chores; it was obviously something she had been looking forward to. “I repeat: this is Gamma Quadrant Remote Station, advising that you have entered a sector under Federation control. Please observe all appropriate navigational procedures. I’m sure you’re familiar with them.”

“Impossible!” The Cardassian’s voice went up another level. “You can make no claim of sovereignty here . . . your substation unit is out of commission. . . .”

“We seem to be doing all right.” Kira leaned back in her chair. “As you can tell, the minor technical problems we were having with our communications systems have been repaired. I assure you that we have met all the requirements for establishing a claim to this sector. This end of the stable wormhole will be administered by Starfleet, for the shared benefit of all the developed worlds. You are certainly free, as are all other vessels, to make arrangements to travel through. And just to show there are no hard feelings—” She let a smile come into her voice. “We’ll drop any investigation into certain misleading statements of purpose that were made by you prior to leaving DS Nine. After all, we can’t really blame you for trying, can we?” The smile grew even more malicious.

“This will go to the tribunal!” Gul Tahgla sounded as if he were about to explode from sheer frustrated wrath. “This is an outrage! You have no right—”

She hit one of the comm panel switches, cutting him off.

“What do you think their chances are?” Bashir stood at the other side of the shuttle’s pilot area, tinkering with the external sensor readouts.

“Legally?” Kira shrugged. “They could make a case, depending upon how much they find out about what we’ve done here. But politically . . . ” She shook her head. “The Cardassians aren’t too popular, even with their allies. Any vote would go against them, just so most of the world would still have the access to the wormhole that the Federation has guaranteed.”

“I wish we could get a look at Gul Tahgla’s vessel right now.” He knew there was no way of accomplishing that, not without revealing their ruse. They had piloted the cargo shuttle in back of the empty substation, hiding themselves from view by the approaching Cardassians. The direction of their comm signal gave the indication that the substation was on-line and inhabited. “I bet it’s really shaking—what with Gul Tahgla bouncing off the walls.”

She turned her smile toward Bashir. “Maybe we should turn the comm link back on. So we could listen.”

He had left the others behind, back on the DS9 station. This way, piloting the runabout with no other crew, he had a precious moment of time to himself. It was when he had been alone before that things had happened. Mysteries beyond all comprehension.

While still on DS9, he had used the station’s subspace link to communicate to Kira and Bashir aboard the cargo shuttle. “I have some news for you,” their commander had spoken from the Ops deck. “The wormhole’s entrance has reappeared in this sector. Preliminary monitoring indicates that it has resumed its previous stability. A relief vessel will reach you shortly.”

Kira had answered him. “That’s what we were hoping for. About the wormhole, I mean.”

“I’ll expect a full report on my desk as soon as possible. From both you and Doctor Bashir.” He had allowed himself to make one small comment of praise before breaking the link. “Good work, Major.” He knew that was all that would be necessary.

Inside the wormhole, he cut the buffered impulse engines to minimum forward thrust. And waited.

A voice moved inside his head.

It is the one called Benjamin Sisko. We recognize you.

He spoke aloud. “I’m flattered.”

The other one, to whom we showed ourselves . . . he exists somewhere else now?

“Yes. He and the one who was with him; they’re both safe now.”

That one was not of time as you are, Benjamin Sisko. Not as wise. But he tried not to harm us. For that, we have made this universe, our flesh, that which you may enter again.

He nodded. “I suspected as much. You still have my promise about that, about the engines being buffered. You won’t be hurt again.”

That is a thing of time. The voice spoke gently. You do not know, and we do not know. It slowly began to fade. Go to the ones of your kind, who wait for you.

For a moment longer, he sat in silence. Then he reached out and brought the engines to full power.

He had recognized the voice, a memory that the wormhole’s inhabitants had taken and used as their mask.

His wife’s voice . . .

Eyes closed, he laid his head back against the seat. He wished they had shown her to him, as well.

She had cleaned herself up and changed into a fresh uniform. Exhaustion rolled through her muscles. She’d have to do some thinking when she got back to her quarters. There would be time for that now. Time to let the blood slow within her veins, to sleep and let dreams come. Instead of memories. The sickness, the weight of guilt and the past, had been purged from that blood. The dead slept; even Hören. She would give herself that much, as well.

As Bashir fastened a new bandage on the wound below her rolled-up sleeve, Kira watched him.

“You know,” she said, “when we get back to DS Nine—”

He looked up at her. “What?”

“We can have that drink together then.”