The War of the Prophets Page 11
interest in or outrage at what transpired next. More escape pods shot free of
the station, only to be drawn back to disappear into the opening maw of the
red-tinged wormhole.
Like the mouth of the human hell, Garak thought. How fitting. How poetic.
And then, faster than the sensor log had been able to record, the image of Deep
Space 9 shrank and was gone, replaced by what could almost pass for the opening
to the Bajoran wormhole. Except that that swirling mass of forces always seemed
to have a blue cast to the energies it released, and this second wormhole was
most definitely color-shifted to the red half of the visible-light spectrum.
Captain Sisko's voice disrupted the silence in the briefing room. "That wasn't
how we experienced the station's collapse."
Sisko, Major Kira, and Commander Arla were seated up front in the first row of
hard Klingon chairs, to which they had been escorted by Romulan security guards
only moments before the briefing began. Garak could understand why the captain
of the Defiant had been separated from the other passengers and crew when they
had been beamed to the Boreth. But he didn't know why the major and the
commander had been taken with him, unless it was because they were the only two
Bajorans among the eighteen. He would, however, endeavor to find out. Though
Garak knew he would never admit to curiosity—at least, not in a public sense—he
was fully aware mat he lived his life in a perpetual haze of it.
Sisko continued his correction of the sensor log's account. "We saw the
collapse of the station proceed more slowly while we were under attack by
Terrell's ship."
How very interesting, Garak thought, only his long
years of training allowing him to keep Ms face completely composed.
A young Romulan who stood at the side of the briefing room, improbably
outfitted in a poorly fitted variation of a Bajoran militia uniform, switched on
a padd so that his angular face was illuminated from below. Then he looked over
to Sisko and said, "That tends to confirm the hypothesis that the Defiant was
caught within the boundary layer of the opening wormhole. Your ship would men
have been subjected to relativistic time-dilation effects."
"Then shouldn't the same have happened to Terrell's ship?" Sisko asked.
Garak waited eagerly for the answer. But the Romulan was not forthcoming.
"There are no records of that ship as you described it—" The Romulan looked down
at his padd again. "—A Chimera-class vessel disguised as a Sagittarian passenger
liner. In any event, the Defiant was the only vessel to emerge into this time
period."
Pity, Garak thought. He would have enjoyed one final meeting with Terrell. He
would have liked to have seen her face when she learned that their precious
Cardassia no longer existed. Its history, its culture, and all except a handful
of its people erased from the universe, as if they had been nothing but a
half-remembered dream.
He himself had learned the fate of his world just a few hours earlier from two
young Klingon soldiers, also in badly tailored Bajoran uniforms. He had noted
their intense interest in observing him, and upon questioning them had learned
that they had never encountered a Cardassian before. Then they had told him
why.
At that precise instant, Garak had to admit—if only to himself—he had felt a
true pang of regret. But only
for an instant. Immense relief—not sorrow—had immediately followed. In this
time period, there was now nothing left for him to fight for. His struggles were
over.
It was, he had decided, a quite liberating experience.
A Bajoran colonel now appeared on the main viewscreen, obviously reading from a
script, droning on without much clarity of detail about the events of the few
weeks that had followed the opening of the second wormhole. Apparently, the
space-time matrix of the Bajoran sector had been altered in some obscure
technical way by the second wormhole's gravimetric profile. Garak couldn't
follow what the implications of that were, nor was he particularly interested.
But supposedly the behavior of the first wormhole had become more erratic
because of those changes. It had rarely opened after that, and travel through it
had proved impossible.
Then, the Bajoran colonel recounted at tedious length, with the
Cardassian-Dominion alliance mounting a major offensive throughout the region,
a small battle group had broken through Starfleet's crumbling lines and reached
the Bajoran system.
Garak covered his mouth with his hand and yawned outright. This time it wasn't
an affectation. The briefing room was getting uncomfortably hot. He glanced at
the unfinished metal walls, willing himself to see them move away from him and
not close in. His claustrophobia—again a personal idiosyncrasy he avoided
revealing to any other being—was becoming more noticeable of late. He redoubled
bis efforts to suppress it.
Another new sensor-log screen appeared on the viewer, and Garak welcomed it as a
distraction from the heat and closeness of the room. This next recording had
apparently been made by the {7.5.5. Enterprise, also in the Bajoran system, on
Stardate 52145.7.
The new sensor recording began, and for a few seconds all Garak could see was
streaking stars and lances of phaser fire. Then the image stabilized, and he was
able to make out a tightly grouped formation of three Galor-class Cardassian
warships surrounded by a cloud of Jem'Hadar attack cruisers, purple drive fields
aglow. In the background, Garak could once again see the shifting energy curtain
of the Denorios Belt, so he had a reasonably good notion of what he was
watching: the departure of Kai Weyoun's expedition.
Kai Weyoun, Garak mused. He almost felt sorry for poor Major Kira, having to
deal with that corruption of her deeply felt religion. Almost felt sorry. The
major was a Bajoran, after all, and they were a far too sensitive people,
regrettably quick to find fault or take offense. And judging from how they had
created an entire religion around a few sparkling artifacts discarded by a more
advanced species, rather easy to deceive as well.
The new sensor log continued, and Garak's conclusion was confirmed. Just as the
Enterprise swooped in on what seemed to him to be a rather remarkably risky
attack—which nonetheless resulted in the loss of a Cardassian warship—the red
wormhole popped open, just as the blue wormhole so often had. At mat, the two
remaining Galor-class ships and their Jem'Hadar escorts vanished into the red
wormhole, which then collapsed. Though the Enterprise continued on a matching
course, unlike the blue wormhole the red wormhole did not open again.
Very selective, Garak noted. Which meant it was quite likely that the red
wormhole was also home to an
advanced species, or was otherwise under intelligent control.
The current sensor log ended, and the boring Bajoran colonel returned to the
viewscreen to explain that the Weyoun expedition had been intended to traverse
the new phenomenon and attempt to discover if it had a s
econd opening in normal
space, as did the existing phenomenon.
Garak's eyes began to close. Really, the colonel was almost soporific. Even he
could guess that the unstated goal of the expedition had been to determine if
the new wormhole led to the Gamma Quadrant.
But then Garak's eyes opened abruptly. The colonel had not referred to the
wormholes as wormholes. He had pointedly called them phenomena. Why?
Listening more closely now, Garak heard the colonel go on to say that although
it usually took less than two minutes to travel through the existing phenomenon,
the Weyoun expedition remained in the new phenomenon for more than three weeks.
At which time, of the 1,137 valiant soldiers who had made up the expeditionary
force, only Weyoun managed to return. Though he brought with him new allies.
Now another new sensor log began running, this one from a Bajoran vessel, the
Naquo, beginning with a rapid sweep across the Denorios Belt to catch the red
wormhole in the process of opening. And then, from that cauldron of
hyperdimensional energies, Garak saw seven ships appear.
Despite himself Garak leaned forward in his chair, as if those tew extra
centimeters might help him better understand the nature of the seven ships.
Are they transparent? he wondered, for certainly he
could see the glow of the wormhole and the Belt through their elongated, ovoid
shapes.
But as the sensor log displayed a progression of increasingly magnified views,
Garak realized that the seven ships were little more than skeletons—collections
of struts and beams, each vessel slightly different from the rest but with no
obviously contained areas that might correspond to crew quarters.
A sudden flash of light from one of the ships ended the sensor recording.
Sitting back once again, Garak decided the flash of light had been weapons
fire. Wherever the second wormhole had reemerged into normal space, it was
clear that Weyoun had returned with allies.
Once again, the Bajoran colonel returned to the screen. This time Garak did not
feel at all sleepy.
The colonel now stated that the new phenomenon had connected the Bajoran Sector
to a region in the farthest reaches of the Delta Quadrant. There, Weyoun had
made contact with the Grigari, who returned the Vorta when the rest of his
expedition had been lost.
Garak waited for more details, but the colonel offered none. An omission Garak
found distinctly amusing in its circumspection. He himself had heard rumors of
the Grigari most of his Me. Though he could recall no convincing report of
direct contact with the species, their medical technology was often traded at
the frontier, having been obtained from other, intermediary species.
Furthermore, that particular type of medical technology was banned on virtually
every civilized world in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
He recalled once reading a report outlining the results of the Obsidian Order's
analysis of a Grigari flesh regenerator, which some had hoped would enable cer-
tain torture techniques to be used for longer periods of interrogation. The
Order's conclusion: too dangerous.
If but one contraband Grigari device had been deemed by the Obsidian Order to be
too dangerous, then it was daunting to consider the damage a Grigari fleet might
be capable of inflicting. Clearly, what the Bajoran colonel was not saying in
this sanitized briefing was that Weyoun's expedition—Jem'Hadar and Cardassian
alike—had been utterly decimated by the Grigari. Which begged the only questions
worth asking: How had Weyoun survived, and why had the Grigari come through
the wormhole under his command?
Garak repressed the hope that threatened to surface as a smile on his face. A
universe of mystery to explore, he thought It could actually be that there would
be no one here he could bribe, threaten, or seduce into taking him back to his
own time. And if so, he might grow to like it here.
He settled back to see what else would unfold from this selective presentation
of the past twenty-five years, and what answers, if any, might be forthcoming.
So far, it seemed, for each mystery described and explained two new ones were
being revealed and left enigmatic.
As the briefing continued, the ever-curious Garak was not disappointed.
CHAPTER 9
with seven lifetimes of experience to draw on, Jadzia Dax recognized a dying
Starship when she saw one, and the Augustus was dying.
It obviously had been launched before completion— its environmental controls
were malfunctioning. The nature of the vessel's exposed wires, pipes, and
conduits also told her that redundancy and self-repair capabilities were
nonexistent. And there were appallingly few signs of any attempt to make the
ship a secure home for her crew. Even the earliest starships had used paint and
colored lights to vary the visual environment and prevent boredom from setting
in on long voyages or tours of duty. Yet even those simple grace notes were
missing from mis ship.
And just as the yellowing of a single leaf can indicate the failing health of a
tree, Jadzia was further convinced that the decline of the Augustus was not an
isolated event. It was a symptom of a greater disease, one that must infect all
of Starfleet.
None of these conclusions had she shared with Worf, however. Even as she had
walked with him through the narrow, unfinished corridors of the ship escorted by
Vulcan security guards, each wearing phaser-visors, Jadzia had remained silent,
as had he. Now, with little more than a look exchanged since she and her husband
had been escorted to the cramped cabin that was to be their prison cell, Jadzia
knew that Worf had reached the same conclusion she had.
They were under surveillance.
The fact mat the Vulcan captain of this vessel could subject them to the
barbaric test of their humanity on the hangar deck was proof enough that this
Starfleet had deviated from the ideals that had drawn Jadzia to serve in it The
computer briefing she and Worf had watched on the holographic screen had been
further evidence of whatever disease was responsible for the decay around them.
Whether the briefing had been a complete lie or not Jadzia couldn't be certain.
But she was convinced that it had not been the complete truth.
She had seen that same realization hi Worf's eyes as well.
Because no matter how limited Starfleet's ship construction and maintenance
capacities had become, no matter how brutal and arbitrary its commanders, Jadzia
could not for an instant believe that in a mere twenty-five years Starfleet and
the Federation had degenerated to the point that they would take part in a
religious war. It was unthinkable.
Yet according to the computer briefing, mat's exactly what was under way—the War
of the Prophets.
Somehow, since the destruction of Deep Space 9 a new religious movement on
Bajor, centered on the beings discovered to live in the second wormhole, had
become a rallying point for a new interstellar political entity—the Bajoran
Ascendancy. If the briefing was to be believed, the Ascendancy had early on
launched a series of unprovoked attacks against Federation territory that had
resulted in years of tense negotiations and border skirmishes, each side
accusing the other of ongoing acts of terrorism.
Had that been the end of the story, Jadzia might have understood how a state of
war could come to exist, with the Ascendancy attempting to take over new systems
and the Federation attempting to maintain its borders.
But according to the briefing that was not the point of the undeclared war.
The goal of the Ascendancy was not to acquire new territory. It was simply to
prohibit the passage of non-Ascendancy ships through the Bajoran Sector,
including the homeworld system and the four closest colony worlds. In Jadzia's
time—in fact, throughout the existence of the Federation—Starfleet had always
respected the sovereignty of independent systems. The Prime Directive permitted
it to do nothing less.
But according to that same briefing, which Jadzia had found to be a particularly
deplorable piece of propaganda, long on emotion and short on facts, the goal of
Starfleet in this war was not to defend Federation territory, not to contain
Ascendancy forces within their own boundaries, but actually to invade the
Bajoran home system and destroy the second wormhole, ending the new Bajoran
religion.
Even seven lifetimes had not prepared her for the
utter revulsion she felt for the Starfleet of this time. What had happened to
the Prime Directive? What had happened to the Fundamental Declarations? For a
moment the Trill had even found herself wondering if, in addition to traveling
through time, the Defiant had somehow crossed over into a parallel universe, one
closer to the horrors of the Mirror Universe than to the one she had lived in.
Their Vulcan captors had told them that the briefing would answer all their
questions. But so many new ones had been raised in Jadzia that she had come to
feel liberated. When she had entered the Academy, she had pledged herself to
uphold the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation. When she had graduated, she
had taken her oath as an officer to do the same. As a result, she felt no
conflict in her present resolve to behave according to that pledge and that
oath—both made to the Starfleet of the past and not to this hollow, dying