The War of the Prophets Read online

  There is linear in the nonlinear, so that neither exists one without the otherThere

  is linear in the nonlinear, so that neither exists one without the other. So it

  was with anslem, and all the multitudes that he held within himself, myself

  among them, in that place that was no place, obtained only by knowing the

  absence of hours in the hourglass. An hourglass as the entry­way? Was there ever

  such a joke to make even a Vulcan laugh at those immensities and contradic­tions

  of meaning? Yet caught in that sea of sand, drawn toward the neck of that

  hourglass where both the Temples at last were aligned—well, what else could we

  do in those vast temporal currents but race time....

  —jake sisko, Anslem

  PROLOGUE

  In the Hands of the Prophets

  "THIS does not happen," Captain Jean-Luc Picard says.

  The Sisko walks with him by the cool waters of Bajor. "It does not, but it did,"

  the Sisko says. "Look around and see it for yourself."

  They stand together on the Promenade, the Sisko and O'Brien and twelve-year-old

  Jake with his bare feet and his fishing pole, and with Kai Winn and Vic and Arla

  Rees and all of them, and they watch the Prome­nade die exactly as it dies the

  first time, deck plates buckling, power currents sparking, debris and trailing

  strips of dislodged carpet spiraling into the singularity that is Quark's

  bar—where the Red Wormhole opens the doors to the second Temple.

  "There is no second Temple," Admiral Ross says.

  He sits across from the Sisko in the Wardroom of Deep Space 9. Behind him, the

  casualty lists scroll end-

  lessly as the war with the Dominion begins, ends, be­gins again.

  The Sisko stands at the center of B'hala, in the shade of the bantaca tower.

  "But there was," the Sisko says.

  "There is no was," Kira protests.

  "Then explain this," the Sisko replies.

  He is with them on the bridge of the Defiant as Deep Space 9 is consumed by the

  Red Wormhole and the ship is trapped in a net of energies that pull it from that

  time to another yet to be.

  In his restaurant in New Orleans, the Sisko's father says, "That time is

  meaningless."

  On the sands of Tyree, the Sisko's true mother says, "And another time yet to be

  is more meaningless still."

  In the serene confines of the Bajoran Temple on the Promenade the Sisko's

  laughter echoes. "You still don't understand!" It is a marvel to him, this

  continuation of a state of being that should not exist without flesh to bind it.

  "I am here to teach you, am I not?"

  "You are the Sisko, pallie," Vic agrees.

  The Sisko makes it clear for them. "Then... pay at­tention!"

  The Prophets take their places in the outfield as the Sisko steps up to the

  plate.

  "Not this again," Nog says.

  The Sisko is delighted. "Again! That's right! You're finally getting the idea!"

  He tosses his baseball into the air. It hangs like a planet in space, wheeling

  about Bajor-B'hava'el, until there appears a baseball bat like a comet sparkling

  through the stars to—

  Interruption.

  The Sisko is in the light space.

  Jennifer stands before him, her legs crushed by the debris on the dying

  Saratoga, her clothes sodden with her blood. "You keep bringing us back to the

  baseball game."

  The Sisko takes her hand in his. "Yes! Because now it is you—" He looks around

  the nothingness, knowing they are all within it. "—all of you who will not go

  for­ward!"

  Jennifer is in her robes of Kente cloth, as she wears them on the day they are

  wed. "There is no forward."

  The Sisko discovers he is learning about this place, as if when he falls with

  Dukat and his flesh is con­sumed by the flames of the Fire Caves, all resistance

  to the speed of thought is lost.

  "If there is no forward," he argues, "then why are we not already there? Why do

  you not know everything that I tell you?"

  "You are linear," General Martok reminds him, as if he could forget.

  "So are you," the Sisko says.

  And for the very first time, the Sisko now forces them from the light space to a

  place he makes real, where from the mists of the moon of AR-558 Jem'Hadar

  soldiers ad­vance and Houdini mines explode all around them.

  "What is this?" they plaintively chorus.

  "This is death," the Sisko tells them. "This is change. This is the forward

  progression of time to an end in which there is no more forward. This is the

  fate of all beings—even your fate."

  "Impossible," Kai Opaka says by the reflecting pool.

  The Sisko leans against the bar on Space Station

  K-7, smiling as he looks down at the old gold shirt he wears with the arrowhead

  emblem that is only that, not a single molecule of communicator circuitry within

  it. "This is what has gone before," he informs the smooth-foreheaded Klingons at

  the bar.

  The Sisko stands on the sands of Mars, before the vast automated factories where

  nanoassemblers fabri­cate the parts for Admiral Picard's mad dream—the U.S.S.

  Phoenix. "This is what is yet to be," he informs the Tellarite engineers at his

  side.

  And now it is he who returns them to the light space. "And you are all part of

  that continuum from past to future, with an end before you as surely as you had

  a beginning."

  "What is this?" Arla asks in despair.

  "It is why I am here."

  "You are the Emissary," Nog agrees.

  The Sisko shakes his head. "I am not the Emissary. I am your Emissary."

  "How is there a difference?" Grand Nagus Zek asks.

  "Think to an earlier time. The first time I came be­fore you."

  "You are always before us," O'Brien says.

  "I am before you now," the Sisko agrees. "As your Emissary. As one who has come

  to teach you what you do not know. But before that first time—you must

  re­member!"

  The Sisko brings them all back to the baseball game.

  "Here—this first time—you did not know who I was!"

  Solok looks at Martok. "Adversarial."

  Martok looks at Eddington. "Confrontational."

  Eddington looks at Picard. "He must be destroyed."

  The Sisko throws a ball high in the air, swings, hits

  one out of the park, and all the Prophets turn to watch the orb vanish in the

  brilliant blue sky.

  "Do you see?" the Sisko asks. "How things have changed? The way you were then.

  The way you are now."

  The Prophets are silent.

  Nineteen-year-old Jake steps forward from them all.

  "This... does not happen," the young man says.

  "Maybe you're right," the Sisko sighs. He sits at his desk in his 1953 Harlem

  apartment, pushes his glasses back along the bridge of his nose, flexes his

  fingers, then Bennie types on the Remington: Maybe all of this did happen ...

  The Sisko stands on Bajor, gazing up as that world's sun reacts to the

  proto-matter pul
se set off by the Gri-gari task force eight minutes earlier and

  goes super­nova, claiming all the world and all its inhabitants on the last

  night of the Universe.

  ... or maybe none of it happened, Bennie types.

  "But still," the Sisko says as he tosses another base­ball into the air, "you

  want to find out what happens next because, for now, you just don't know."

  "We know everything," Admiral Ross says.

  "Then answer me this," the Sisko says as another fly ball clears the home-run

  fence. "When I first came to you, when you did not know me, why did you want to

  destroy me?"

  The Prophets are silent.

  "Then see this, and answer an even greater mys­tery," the Sisko says, as he

  returns them all to the bridge of the Defiant just as Captain Thomas Riker

  de­livers his ultimatum.

  "What mystery?" Weyoun asks, clad in his Vedek's robes.

  "I will show you the fate of the people who pray to the Prophets as gods. But

  then you must tell me: To whom do the Prophets pray?"

  The Prophets still do not answer.

  But they watch as the Sisko continues his story....

  CHAPTER 1

  like the thirty-three fragile beings within her battered hull, in less than a

  minute the Starship Defiant would die.

  Wounded. Space-tossed. Twenty-five years from home. Her decks littered with the

  bodies of those who had not survived her journey. And for those who still lived,

  her smoke-filled corridors reverberated with sen­sor alarms warning that enemy

  weapons were locked onto her, ready to fire.

  Beyond her forward hull, the U.S.S. Opaka acceler­ated toward an attacking wing

  of three Starfleet vessels. But adding to the confusion of all aboard the

  Defiant, that warship, which was defending them—inexplicably named for a woman

  of peace—appeared to be a Starfleet vessel as well.

  The Opaka was almost a kilometer long, and though her basic design of twin

  nacelles and two main hulls was little changed from the earliest days of

  humanity's

  first voyages to the stars, each element of the warship was stretched to an

  aggressive extreme, most notably the two forward-facing projections thrusting

  out from her command hull like battering rams. Now, as she closed in on her

  prey, needle-thin lances of golden en­ergy pulsed from her emitter rings.

  Existing partially in the other dimensions of Cochrane space, those destruc­tive

  energy bursts reached their targets at faster-than-light velocities, only to be

  dispersed into rippling patterns of flashing squares of luminescence as they

  were broken apart by whatever incomprehensible shields protected the three

  attacking Starfleet vessels.

  In response, the Opaka launched a second warp-speed volley—miniature stars

  flaring from her launch­ing tubes. The sudden light they carried sprayed across

  the Defiant's blue-gray hull—the only radiance to illu­minate her so deep in the

  space between the stars, for there was no glow from her warp engines.

  Wisps of venting coolant began escaping from the Defiant's cracked hull plates,

  wreathing her in vapor. Within the ruin of her engine room, at the source of the

  leaking coolant, the hyperdimensional stability of her warp core seethed from

  instability to uselessness a thousand times each second.

  The ship had no weapons. Diminished shields. No propulsion. The most limited of

  life-support, and even that was rapidly failing.

  But seconds from destruction, caught in a battle of a war that belonged only to

  her future, the Defiant, like her crew, was not finished yet.

  "Choose your side!" Captain Thomas Riker screamed from the Defiant's

  bridge viewer.

  And within this exact same moment, Captain Ben­jamin Sisko was frozen—twenty

  years of Starfleet training preventing him from making any decision under these

  circumstances.

  Somehow, when Deep Space 9 had been destroyed by the opening of a second

  wormhole in Bajoran space, the Defiant had become enmeshed in the outer edges of

  the phenomenon's boundary layer and, like an ancient sailing ship swept 'round

  an ocean maelstrom, she had been propelled into a new heading—almost twenty-five

  years in her future.

  The year 2400, Jadzia Dax had said.

  Which meant—according to Starfleet general orders and to the strict regulations

  of the Federation Depart­ment of Temporal Investigations—that it was now the

  responsibility of all aboard the Defiant to refrain from any interaction with

  the inhabitants of this future. Oth­erwise, when Sisko's ship returned to her

  proper time, his crew's knowledge of this future could prevent this timeline

  from ever coming to pass—setting in place a major temporal anomaly. Thus the

  source of Sisko's paralysis was simple: How could his ship and crew re­turn from

  a future that would never exist?

  With the weight of future history in the balance, Sisko could not choose sides

  as Riker demanded. Whatever this War of the Prophets was—and Sisko wished he had

  never even heard Riker say that name— he and the crew of the Defiant had to

  remain neutral. Starfleet and the FDTI allowed them no other option.

  Sisko straightened in his command chair. "Mr. O'Brien. All power to shields—even

  life-support!"

  Almost immediately, the lights in the bridge dimmed and the almost imperceptible

  hum of the air circulators

  began to slow. At the same time, Sisko felt the artificial gravity field lessen

  to its minimum level, and under­stood that his chief engineer had chosen to

  reply to his order through instant action in place of time-wasting speech.

  Then the Defiant was rocked by a staccato series of explosive impacts unlike any

  Sisko had ever experi­enced.

  "What was that?" Dr. Bashir protested to no one in particular. He was holding

  his tricorder near Jadzia, checking her head wound once again.

  "Shields from sixty-eight to twelve percent!" O'Brien reported with awe. "From

  one hit!"

  Sisko had already ordered the main viewer set to a fifty-percent reduction in

  resolution so that no one on the bridge—especially O'Brien and Jadzia—might

  in­advertently pick up clues about future technology sim­ply by seeing what the

  ships of this time looked like. But the display still held enough detail to show

  the at­tacking Starfleet vessels flash by. The three craft, each twice the

  Defiant's length and half its width, were shaped like daggers, the tips of their

  prows glowing as if they were nothing more than flying phaser cannons.

  "Worf!" Sisko said urgently. "What are they firing at us?"

  "Energy signature unknown!" Worf's deep voice tri­umphed over even the raucous,

  incessant alarms. "Propulsion systems unknown!"

  Now the Opaka streaked by in pursuit. The viewer flickered with flashes of

  disruptive energy as once again the hull of the Defiant echoed with the thumps

  of multiple physical impacts.

  "Worf?" Sisko asked. Under the circumstances, it

  was a detailed enough question for the Defiant's first officer.

  "Sixteen objects have materialized on our hull," Worf answered without

  hesitation. "They are attached with molecular adhesion. Sensors show antimatter

  pods in each."

&
nbsp; "Contact mines," Sisko said, pushing himself to his feet. "Beamed through what's

  left of our shields."

  Jadzia called out to Sisko from her science station. Her hair was still in

  uncharacteristic disarray. The med­ical patch on the side of her forehead

  obscured her deli­cate Trill spotting. But nothing could disguise the

  apprehension in her tone. "We're out of our league here, Benjamin. I think the

  mines were beamed in from those three ships, but I can't make any sense of their

  transporter traces. For what it's worth, they probably could've punched through

  our shields even at one hun­dred percent."

  Major Kira didn't look up from her position at the helm. "The three attackers

  are on their way back. The Opaka's still in pursuit."

  Worf spoke again. "Sir, I am detecting a countdown signal from the mines on our

  hull. They are pro­grammed to detonate in seventy-three seconds."

  Sisko grimaced, trying to understand the logic of that. "Why a countdown? If

  they can beam antimatter bombs through our shields, why not set them to go off

  at once?'

  Commander Arla Rees had the answer. "It's what die other captain said." The tall

  Bajoran spun around from her auxiliary sensor station. " 'Every ship is needed

  for the war.' He said he wasn't going to let the Defiant get away."

  Sisko struck the arm of his chair with one fist. "Of

  course! The other side wants us too, and they'll only detonate the mines if—"

  He and everyone on the bridge involuntarily flinched, shielding their eyes from

  the sudden flare of blinding light that shot forth from the viewscreen faster

  than the ship's overtaxed computers could compensate for. At precisely the same

  instant, the deafening rumble of an explosion erupted from the bridge speakers

  as the Defiant's sensors automatically converted the impact of energy particles

  hi the soundless vacuum of space into synthetic noise, giving the crew an

  audible indication of the size and the direction of the far-off explosion.

  "One of the attackers ..." Kira said in disbelief. "It dropped from warp and

  rammed the Opaka." She looked back over her shoulder. "Captain, that ship had a

  crew of fifty-eight."

  Now at Sisko's side, Bashir murmured under his breath, "Fanatics."

  Sisko tried and failed to comprehend what such des­perate action said about the

  Starfleet of this day.

  "Forty seconds until detonation," Worf warned.

  "Captain," O'Brien added, "our transporters are off­line. I can't get rid of the