The War of the Prophets Page 18

  Sisko saw Kira abruptly rub her eyes, and he felt confident he had broken the

  spell of the moment. He glanced next at Aria, expecting to see a less emotional

  reaction, since Bajor had never been her home. But to Sisko's surprise, tears

  streaked the young woman's face.

  "I never knew," she said.

  Weyoun nodded. "Of course, you didn't. Keep watching."

  In the middle of the main viewer, a new source of light slid into view and

  recaptured Sisko's attention. He squinted at the screen. It was as if a hole had

  been cut in some vast curtain to let an enormous searchlight bring day to the

  middle of night.

  "Where's that light coming from?" Kira asked before he could.

  "Orbital mirrors," Weyoun said smugly. "Bajor-synchronous, tens of kilometers

  wide, constantly refo-cused so that the sun will never set on ..."

  "B'hala," Aria breathed.

  Weyoun shot a triumphant look at Sisko. "The jewel of Bajor Ascendant," he said.

  "Home of our culture, the revelation site of the first Orb to be given to the

  Ba-joran people. Lost for millennia, then rediscovered ex­actly as prophesied,

  by the Sisko. I hope you appreciate the importance of what you have given the

  Bajoran people, and the universe, Benjamin. Everything that has happened these

  past twenty-five years, everything that will happen in the days ahead, is all

  because of you."

  The Vorta inclined his head in Sisko's direction as if worshipping him.

  Sisko's hands were balled into fists within the folds of his robes. "I refuse to

  accept responsibility for your perversion of the Bajoran faith."

  Weyoun tried and failed to restrain a sudden fit of amused laughter. "Even your

  obstinacy in the face of truth was prophesied by the great mystics of Jalbador—

  Shabren, Eilin, and Naradim. Your life, your deeds, your great

  accomplishments—an open book, Benjamin.

  As if the mystics had stood at your side through all of it Your protest is quite

  futile, I assure you."

  And then B'hala, bathed in perpetual sunlight, slipped from the viewer, and only

  a handful of small oases ap­peared, tiny clusters of lights strung out across

  the vast stretch of the mountains forming the Ir'Abehr Shield.

  'Torse," Weyoun said in a brisk, businesslike voice of command, "that's enough

  of the surface. Change vi­sual sensors and show our guests our destination."

  Sisko looked back over his shoulder to see the Romulan with the golden padd,

  Torse presumably, obe­diently turn to a sensor station and make rapid

  adjust­ments to the controls. Then Sisko heard both Kira and Arla gasp, and he

  turned back to face the viewer.

  To see Deep Space 9 again.

  Ablaze with lights. Surrounded by a cometary halo of spacecraft of all classes.

  Each docking port filled. Each pylon connected to a different starship. He even

  recog­nized one of those ships as Captain Tom Riker's Opaka.

  Sisko stumbled to voice his swirling thoughts. "The logs... on the sensor

  logs... DS9... I saw it de­stroyed. .. "

  Weyoun stood up and with a flourish freed his arms from his robes. "Never doubt

  the power of the Ascen­dancy, Benjamin." His face creased in warning. "Never."

  Staring at the home he had shared with his son and with Kasidy, and which he had

  never expected to see again, Sisko felt Weyoun's light touch on his arm. "As it

  was written so long ago: Welcome home, Benjamin. We've been waiting for you."

  CHAPTER 13

  julian bashir felt as if he were caught in a dream. The sense of unreality that

  had begun to envelop him as he had watched the briefing tape on the Augustus had

  be­come more than a minor sense of unease at the back of his mind. Now that he

  was on Mars, his apprehension was like a cloak that covered him completely,

  weight­ing each breath he took, obscuring his vision, masking his powers of

  analysis.

  Even worse, at times he only felt human.

  Of the fifteen temporal refugees who had heard Cap­tain Nog's proposal at

  Starbase 53, nine had volun­teered to join Project Phoenix and lose themselves

  even more thoroughly in time.

  Of the six who had declined, five had been the Ba­jorans among them—three

  members of the militia and two civilians. In all good conscience, they had

  honestly explained that they could not take action against B'hala

  and their own people, though they understood why Starfleet felt it must They

  requested instead that they be allowed to spend the next few weeks in prayer, so

  that they might put all their trust in the Prophets.

  To Bashir's relief, the Bajorans' request had caused no consternation among Nog

  and his staff. Arrange­ments would be made, the Bajorans were told. Despite the

  War of the Prophets, their refusal had been accepted as simply as that. Some

  sense of Starfleet's original de­cency, it seemed, still existed in this time.

  The last holdout to refuse the mission was—to no one's surprise—Vash. And also

  to no one's surprise, the volatile archaeologist was not allowed to go anywhere

  or do anything except accompany the others to Utopia Planitia. Nog informed her

  that she would not be forced to join the crew of the Phoenix, but neither would

  she be released from custody until the end of "hostilities."

  Bashir recalled cringing at that euphemism, though he realized that the Ferengi

  captain had also felt un­comfortable using it. Under current conditions, such a

  term could refer to the approaching end of the universe as much as to the end of

  the great undeclared war against the Ascendancy.

  Nog had subsequently left Starbase 53 on the same day he had first met with the

  temporal refugees, after an oddly tense dinner he shared with them. The

  spirited, private conversation Jake Sisko had with his aged child­hood friend

  before they were all seated in the officer's mess did not go unobserved by

  Bashir. Clearly there was some conflict between those two.

  By itself, Bashir did not find such discord remark­able. No doubt there would be

  abandonment issues on both sides of the friendship: Why was it that Nog was

  left behind on the day that DS9 was destroyed? Why was it that Jake had

  apparently died, yet now lived again, full of the energy of youth, which Nog as

  a mid­dle-aged Ferengi no doubt missed?

  Yet something more had passed between the two friends and Bashir, for all his

  intellectual powers, had to admit his frustration that he had no way of

  determin­ing just what that something more was.

  Three days later, everyone had arrived at the Utopia Planitia shipyards aboard

  Captain T'len's Augustus. Like all cadets, Bashir himself had toured the

  facility in his second year; from Mars orbit, both the constellation of orbital

  spacedocks and the vast construction fields on the planet's surface were larger

  than he remembered them being. In the support domes, though, it seemed to Bashir

  that the corridors and rooms at least were almost identical to his memories of

  them. Except, of course, for the pervasive and somewhat depressing lack of

  maintenance and repair.

  Upon their arrival at Starbase 53, he and the others were told that fifteen

  different Starfleet outposts throughout what was left of the Federation had been

 
subjected to terrorist attack on the same day the Defiant had reappeared.

  Reportedly, Utopia Planitia had been one of the hardest hit, with more man 200

  personnel in­jured and 35 dead. When the pressure shield of his habitat dome had

  been breached, Nog apparently had managed to save both himself and Admiral

  Picard by taking shelter in a waste-reclamation pumping room that had its own

  atmospheric forcefield.

  Recalling the account they had been given, Bashir couldn't help but feel a bit

  of pride at how Nog had turned out. Everyone on DS9 had taken a hand in helping

  mold

  the youth from the petty juvenile thief he had been at die beginning to the fine

  officer he had so clearly become.

  But to Bashir, a terrorist attack still didn't explain Utopia's torn

  wallcoverings, out-of-service lifts, cracked and damaged furniture, and a

  thousand other deviations from the ordered, precise Starfleet way of doing

  things in which he, like all those in Starfleet, had been trained. Though the

  operational areas of the shipyards still seemed outwardly as functional and as

  fully maintained as before, he couldn't help but see how attention to de­tail

  was sliding. And that unspoken sense of desperation in this beleaguered version

  of Starfleet was contributing mightily to the overwhelming unreality of this

  experi­ence for him.

  Which is why, he supposed, on this his second day in the shipyards he wasn't at

  all shocked when, while going from his quarters to the mess hall, he recog­nized

  a familiar figure, unchanged by time, walking toward bun.

  "Doctor Zimmerman?"

  The bald man, whose quick, intelligent eyes were de­fined by distinct, dark

  eyebrows, halted a few meters from him. At once, Bashir felt himself subjected

  to an intense visual inspection. It was as if he were being compared to the

  contents of some sort of computer library file that only the bald man could see.

  Suddenly he snapped his fin­gers and exclaimed, "Julian Bashir! Of the Defiant!"

  Bashir was puzzled by the way in which Zimmerman chose to identify bun. He and

  the doctor had met on DS9 after all, when the doctor had been developing a

  long-term medical hologram. Zimmerman, however, didn't appear to have aged at

  all in the past twenty-five years.

  "That's right," Bashir said, and he closed the dis-

  tance between them to shake Dr. Zimmerman's hand. He checked the Starfleet rank

  insignia in the middle of the man's chest and smiled politely. "Admiral

  Zimmer­man. Very good, sir. And very deserved, I'm sure."

  The man before him returned his smile, but it was a rueful one. "Actually,

  Doctor Bashir, Lewis Zimmer­man passed away several years ago."

  In his shock, Bashir kept both his hands locked around the bald man's hand. "I

  beg your pardon?"

  "Your confusion is understandable." Still smiling but without real conviction,

  the admiral who wasn't Dr. Zimmerman pulled his hand free from Bashir's grip.

  "In appearance, I was modeled after nun."

  Bashir still felt the heat of the man's hand in his. But if he had heard

  correctly, there was only one possible explanation for what he was seeing. He

  looked up to the left and the right of the corridor, where the stained walls met

  the ceiling.

  "There are no holoemitters," the admiral said.

  "But... are you..."

  "I was," the admiral said in a tone of resignation. "An EMH. Emergency Medical

  Hologram."

  Bashir took a step back. He had known there would be technological advances in

  the past twenty-five years, but this?

  "You are a... a..."

  "Hologram," the admiral said perfunctorily. "Yes. Though obviously a type with

  which you are not famil­iar."

  "I... I am astounded that such an incredible break­through has been made in only

  two and a half decades."

  The hologram sighed. "It actually took more like four hundred years, but what's

  a few centuries among

  Mends? Now, a pleasure to meet you, but I really must be—"

  Bashir interrupted him, suddenly intrigued by a con­struct that was even more

  than an apparently self-aware, self-generating hologram. The artificial being's

  comment about "four hundred years" instantly raised a subject of great medical

  interest. "Excuse me," he said, "but if you meant it took four centuries to

  develop the technology that's freed you from holoemitters, are you referring to

  alien technology, or rather to something ob­tained through time travel?"

  The hologram's eyes crinkled not unpleasantly. "My specifications are on-line

  and, if I might say, make for fascinating bedtime reading. But right now, I am—"

  Another voice broke in, completing the hologram's statement. "Doctor, you are

  late."

  "That's what I was just telling this young man."

  Bashir turned, looking for whoever it was the holo­gram was addressing, and his

  eyes widened as he saw a tall and striking woman, no older than forty, striding

  purposefully toward him. She had an intense, almost belligerent expression; her

  pale blonde hair was drawn back severely, and she wore a Starfleet uniform with

  a blue shoulder and—like the holographic doctor—the rank of admiral.

  She also had an unusual biomechanical implant around her left eye, an implant

  that Bashir was startled to think he recognized.

  "They are waiting for us in briefing room 5," the woman said to the hologram.

  Bashir couldn't keep his eyes off the ocular implant. He offered his hand. "I'm

  Julian Bashir of the Defiant. Admiral... ?"

  The woman looked at Bashir's extended hand as if she were Klingon and he was

  offering her a bowl of dead gagh. She made no attempt to offer her own hand in

  return.

  "Seven," she said flatly. "You are one of the temporal refugees."

  "That's right," Bashir said. Could it be possible? he wondered.

  "And you cannot stop staring at my implant," the ad­miral said.

  "I'm... I'm sorry," Bashir stammered. "But... well, I know I'm twenty-five years

  out of date, but... it looks like Borg technology."

  "It does because it is," Admiral Seven said.

  Bashir felt as if he were falling down a rabbit hole. "You are..."

  The admiral placed her hands behind her back and stared at Bashir with

  impatience. "I am Borg. My des­ignation is Seven of Nine. My function is Speaker

  to the Collective. You must now allow us to continue with our duties. Admiral

  Janeway does not like to be kept waiting."

  Bashir started at the mention of that name. "Admiral Jane—do you mean, Kathryn

  Janeway?"

  "Yes," the hologram said as he stood beside the Borg, "and believe me, it

  doesn't pay to make her angry. So—"

  "Voyager made it back?" Bashir said.

  The Borg frowned at him. "Obviously."

  "But... how?"

  The hologram and the Borg exchanged a look of shared commiseration. Then the

  hologram said to Bashir, "It's a long story. We really do have to go."

  Before Bashir could utter another word, the holo-

  gram and the Borg marched off together. And just be­fore they turned the corner

  into the corridor leading to the briefing rooms, Bashir was stunned to see the

  Borg reach out to hold the hologram's hand as she leaned over to whispe
r in his

  ear as both of them broke out laughing like any young couple in love.

  "Oh, brave new world that has such things in it," Bashir said to no one in

  particular.

  Twenty minutes later in the mess hall, Bashir was still mulling over the

  significance of the beings he had met, and using a padd to review the stunning

  ten-year-old alliance between the Federation and the Borg Col­lective as

  engineered by Admiral Seven of Nine and a Borg whose designation was given only

  as "Hugh."

  Though a great many details of the Treaty of Wolf 359 appeared to be classified,

  it was becoming apparent to him that technology exchanges were at its core. The

  Federation had and was providing expertise in nanite-mediated molecular surgery

  techniques to the Borg, while the Borg were providing transwarp technology

  which, Bashir concluded from reading between the lines, was the basis of Admiral

  Picard's Phoenix.

  "Incredible," Bashir muttered to himself.

  "What is?"

  Startled, Bashir looked up to see Jake Sisko. How had he missed his approach?

  Even his enhanced senses seemed to be subject to his bewildering state of

  confu­sion these days. "The Borg," he said. "The Borg appear to be our allies

  now."

  Bashir nodded as Jake gestured with the tray of food he held, to ask permission

  to sit down with him.

  "I heard that, too," Jake told him, taking the seat op-

  posite Bashir. The tall youngster leaned forward across the small mess table and

  dropped his voice. "But I can't get anyone to tell me what happened to the

  Klingon Empire. Are they part of the Federation now? On the side of the

  Ascendancy? People either ignore the ques­tion or they tell me the information's

  classified."

  Bashir looked around the mess hall. At full capacity, it might hold 300

  personnel. But right now, perhaps be­cause it was between shifts, there were

  only 23 others eating meals or nursing mugs of something hot Twenty of these

  other diners were Andorians, the other three Tellarite.

  "Have you seen another human here?" Bashir asked Jake.

  Now Jake looked around the mess hall. "Well... wasn't the lieutenant who showed

  us our quarters human?"

  Bashir shook his head. "Vulcan."

  Jake frowned. "At Starbase 53 there were humans. The medical staff."

  Bashir held up two fingers. "Two technicians. On a staff of fifteen."