The Long Mirage

by David R. George III

  “Aye, Captain.” Before departing, the doctor addressed Kira directly. “It’s good to see you again, Vedek.” Kira nodded but said nothing, and Boudreaux headed for the hangar door.

  After he’d gone, Ro pointed to the vedek’s ship. The captain had questions about the vessel—Had the Prophets created it Themselves, and if not, then where had it come from?—but for the moment she would wait to ask them. Ro perceived an urgency in the vedek’s manner and in her entreaty for a confidential conversation. “Can we find privacy aboard?”

  Kira nodded again, then led the captain up the steps and into the main cabin. Ro found the space cramped. Six chairs on either side of the small compartment faced each other, leaving little room to maneuver. Peering aft, Ro saw that the bulk of the interior had been given over to a large transporter platform and what looked like a cargo hold.

  Ro sat down in one of the two forward chairs, located at the vessel’s main console. Kira remained standing. “I’ll be happy to answer all of your questions, Captain, but there are some things I need to know first,” the vedek said. “What can you tell me about the Ascendants’ attack and what happened on Endalla? And what about the fate of Taran’atar?”

  The questions surprised Ro. Had somebody informed Kira about everything that had taken place over the past couple of months? Had she somehow been a witness to those events? All of the incidents to which she referred had taken place during the vedek’s absence . . . unless— “Did you encounter the Ascendants inside the wormhole? Did you visit their world there?”

  The vedek blinked. “What?” she finally said, plainly confused by what Ro had asked. “Are you saying that there is an Ascendant world . . . inside the Celestial Temple?” Kira looked almost as though she’d been struck. She sat down heavily in the other chair at the front panel. She gazed off to one side, through the forward port, but Ro thought she actually looked inward, searching for some form of understanding. At last, she peered back at the captain and leaned toward her. “What are you talking about?”

  ii

  * * *

  Kira listened in silence as Captain Ro related an account of what had transpired over the previous two months in the Bajoran system—and in the wormhole. The vedek attempted to process the implications of what she heard, a task rendered more difficult by the tumultuous impact of her own circumstances. Only moments before—at least by Kira’s reckoning—she had been working in the Gamma Quadrant with Taran’atar to fend off an Ascendant attack on Idran IV. They sought not only to protect the planet’s Eav’oq population, but to safeguard Kai Pralon during her visit there. They succeeded, and the vedek then followed Taran’atar as he pursued the Ascendant fleet through the wormhole and into the Bajoran system.

  Except that when Kira had exited the Celestial Temple in the Alpha Quadrant, she’d detected no ships ahead of her. Instead, she spied an enormous space station occupying the coordinates of the old Cardassian ore-processing facility that had eventually become Deep Space 9, and which had ultimately been destroyed. Although Kira had never seen a base like the one she encountered upon leaving the wormhole, she still recognized its Starfleet design. A magnified view revealed the skewed chevron that represented the space service, as well as the words UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS marching down the outer edge of one of the station’s vertical rings. The vedek concluded at once that, during her transit through the Celestial Temple, the Prophets had moved her temporally, from the past, when Bajor first faced an offensive by the Ascendants, back to her own time.

  Kira felt beset as the captain unspooled the story of recent events. It angered the vedek to hear of another Ohalavaru assault on Endalla, then confused her when she learned about their discovery deep beneath the moon’s surface of what they described as a falsework. The return of the Ascendants did not entirely surprise her—Raiq had remained convinced that some of her people had somehow survived the conflagration above Bajor—but their collective metamorphosis into a link of shape-shifters did. Kira did not know what to make of Taran’atar’s presence among them, or of the revelation that they had all entered the Celestial Temple and formed into a malleable world there, apparently to stay.

  The vedek could not help but speculate about her own time spent within the wormhole. She had walked along the surface of a world there, had witnessed events from the past that had seemed to unfold directly before her. More than that, she had lived as another person, evidently sometime deep in Bajor’s history, and though she could no longer fully recall the details of that experience, it occurred to her that it all could have been an elaborate simulation created in an environment that could readily alter its form. Once she had sorted it out in her mind, she knew she would have to reveal all of it to the captain.

  When Ro finished speaking, the vedek remained quiet. Kira tried to collate what she had been through with what the captain had just told her, searching for meaning in the flow of events. She wanted to understand the will of the Prophets, but she also recognized the folly in trying to do so. Still, the contours of how it all fit together seemed tantalizingly close.

  “So you didn’t have anything at all to do with what’s happened,” Ro finally said, breaking the silence. “You didn’t even know about any of it.” She offered the observations as statements, not as questions.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But then why would you ask specifically about those incidents?” the captain asked. “How could you even know to ask about them?” For the moment, her attitude seemed more a matter of curiosity than of suspicion, but Kira knew that would change quickly if she chose anything other than complete disclosure with Ro.

  “I wasn’t asking about anything you just told me,” the vedek said. “I was asking about the Ascendants’ attack on Bajor, and Taran’atar triggering Iliana Ghemor’s isolytic subspace weapon.”

  “But all of that happened eight years ago . . . and you were there,” Ro said. “You witnessed everything that took place.”

  “Not everything,” Kira said. “I didn’t see what happened on the other side of the wormhole before the Ascendants traveled through it.”

  “Of course not,” the captain agreed. “How could you?”

  “Because I was there,” Kira said. “Because after the wormhole collapsed, I lived some sort of alternate life within it—or I imagined that I did—and then the Prophets sent me deep into the Gamma Quadrant . . . and into the past.”

  Ro nodded slowly, and Kira could see her putting the pieces together. “So while you faced the Ascendants as the commanding officer of Deep Space Nine, a future version of yourself existed on the other side of the wormhole?”

  “Yes,” Kira said. “And I thought . . . I thought that maybe I could change what happened. I thought that I might be able to prevent the scientists on Endalla from being wiped out, that I could keep Taran’atar from getting killed. I tried but . . .” Kira did not finish her sentence. Ro did.

  “But even after whatever actions you took,” the captain said, “everything transpired the way it had originally.”

  “Yes,” Kira said, the admission painful. I thought I was the Hand of the Prophets. Had she imagined her encounters with Them? Or had she misinterpreted Their intentions for her?

  No, neither, the vedek realized. The Prophets had communicated with her, They had meant for her to act on Their behalf. She had simply failed.

  “Except . . . maybe that’s not what originally happened,” Ro proposed. “Maybe, before your future self intervened, all of Bajor was destroyed by the Ascendants.”

  Kira considered the possibility. As she understood it, temporal theorists believed that, in typical situations that involved time travel—if ever travel through time could be considered typical—such unknowable discontinuities abounded. In the vedek’s own experience with the Prophets, though, her awareness of historical changes remained. When Akorem Laan—a poet who had been lost with one of his greatest compositions left unfinished—
returned to his own time and concluded his work, Kira retained memories of the incomplete poem. The vedek said as much to Ro.

  “Then maybe the Prophets sent you into the past specifically so that your actions would result in what happened,” the captain suggested.

  “The destruction of Endalla’s ecosystem and the deaths of all the scientists there?” Kira said. “That doesn’t sound like something the Prophets would do.”

  “But if, without your involvement, Endalla and Bajor would have been lost, it makes sense,” the captain went on. “And if the Prophets put you in place to influence those events, then it stands to reason that you impacted what followed: the merging of the Ascendants and Taran’atar in a shape-shifting link, their establishment of a world inside the wormhole, and the discovery of the Endalla falsework.”

  Kira’s mind reeled at the implications. Had the Prophets sent her into the Gamma Quadrant in the past specifically so that she could ensure that Taran’atar traveled through the wormhole aboard Even Odds, where he would employ the peculiar alien ship to prevent the Ascendants from decimating the population of Bajor? Where the Jem’Hadar’s actions would result in him then physically joining the zealous aliens and forming a world within the Celestial Temple, apparently with the will of the Prophets?

  And was that where I landed inside the wormhole? Kira asked herself. Could she have alit on that variable world before it had been created? She knew well the Emissary’s declaration that the Prophets did not exist linearly in time, and certainly she had witnessed evidence of that herself. It would mean that she had interacted with the Prophets in a place that would not exist until she subsequently set in motion events that would lead to the formation of that place.

  “Maybe,” she finally allowed, and she immediately discovered that she wanted Ro’s explanation to be true. Kira could not pretend that the actions she had taken in the Gamma Quadrant had undone the terrible damage to Endalla or the deaths of the scientists there, but she could see how what she had done had set in motion the later events that Ro had described—events that could be characterized as momentous.

  “Maybe,” the vedek said again, and she heard more conviction in her voice. For the first time, Kira sensed that she might actually have fulfilled the role the Prophets had given her when They had designated her Their Hand.

  iii

  * * *

  Nog sat by himself at a small table in a rear corner of the Replimat. His dinner—actually just an appetizer of relotho larvae—went untouched in a covered dish set off to the side. A slew of personal access display devices lay spread across the tabletop, most of them activated. He looked from one to another, studying images, reading text, interpreting data, trying to formulate some sort of a plan, but he had trouble even determining where to begin.

  “Evening.” Nog looked up to see Lieutenant Commander John Candlewood, DS9’s primary science officer, standing on the other side of the table. He carried a tray with several dishes and a tall glass of water or some other transparent beverage. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Um,” Nog said, unsure how best to decline. He and Candlewood had become friends over their years of service together, first becoming acquainted almost a decade earlier, during Defiant’s historic three-month exploratory mission in the Gamma Quadrant. Though Nog didn’t want any company at that moment, he also didn’t want to hurt the science officer’s feelings. “I’m sorry, John,” he said. “I’m really busy right now and need to be alone.”

  Candlewood nodded, then leaned over and set his tray on the other chair. “If you truly wanted isolation,” he said as he collected up several of the padds, stacked them, and pushed them aside, “you’d be in your very private quarters right now.” Nog started to protest, but Candlewood retrieved his tray and set it down on the table in the freshly cleared space. The science officer’s meal consisted of a bowl of sickeningly green soup, a small plate containing a leafy salad, and a larger dish of variously colored vegetables and cheeses.

  “John, listen,” Nog said, still meaning to ask his friend to allow him solitude, but Candlewood leaned in over the table to glance at the padd atop the pile he had just gathered together. Nog looked at it himself and saw a land map displayed there.

  “Are you going prospecting for treasure on some far-flung world?” Candlewood asked. Despite that Nog had served as a Starfleet officer for more than a dozen years, several of his friends still teased him about the Ferengi penchant for profit.

  “No, I’m not on a treasure hunt,” Nog said, a little more sharply than he’d intended. “No,” he said again, softening his tone. He regarded his friend across the table, and Nog realized that he really did want to talk about what had happened. To that point, he had told nobody about his success in uploading Vic Fontaine’s program to a holosuite—not even Ulu Lani, the beautiful Bajoran woman who worked as a server for Quark, and who had recently taken to flirting with Nog.

  The operations chief looked around to ensure that nobody in the Replimat paid any attention to him and Candle­wood, then lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. Nog filled in his friend about Vic’s matrix and the dramatic, unexplained changes to it. That included the lounge singer living at a seedy hotel, from which he had just the previous night been abducted at gunpoint.

  “So is that what all this is about?” Candlewood asked, waving a hand over the padds on the table.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you planning on doing?”

  Nog shrugged. “I’m going to do the only thing I can do,” he said. “I’m going to reenter the program and rescue Vic.”

  “Rescue him from what?”

  “That’s just it: I don’t know.” Nog sighed in frustration. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “Why don’t you just reinitialize the program?” Candlewood suggested. Nog opened his mouth to protest, but the science officer quickly held up his hands to stop him. “Wait, wait. Sorry,” Candlewood said. “I forgot that Vic is ‘special.’ ”

  Nog could hear the mild disdain in his friend’s voice. Back on the original DS9, Candlewood had visited Vic’s a few times. While he claimed to enjoy those experiences, and admitted that the character possessed a certain virtual charm, the science officer also revealed that he found it a bit strange that Nog could profess friendship with a simulation comprising computer code and holographically projected light.

  “Vic is special,” Nog insisted. “And you know that if I reset his holoprogram, his memories would be completely erased. I’d effectively be killing the Vic Fontaine I know.”

  “Yes, I realize that, I’m sorry,” Candlewood said. “It’s just that . . . until you were able to upload his matrix again, you hadn’t even seen him since the destruction of the old station. That was a long time ago. How much would you really be losing?”

  “I know you think it’s peculiar, but Vic is my friend,” Nog said. “Deleting his memories would be like deleting our friendship.”

  “All right, all right. I shouldn’t judge.” Candlewood dipped a spoon into his soup and raised it to his lips. After taking a few such sips, he stopped and asked, “Didn’t you tell me once before about having to save Vic inside the program?”

  “That was a long time ago too, but yes, a group of us helped Doctor Bashir do that,” Nog said. “That was a well-defined problem specifically included in the code, though, with recognizable parameters and a clear resolution.”

  “A ‘jack-in-the-box,’ ” Candlewood said.

  “Right,” Nog said. “Which is why I’ve contacted Felix Knightly, the man who created Vic’s code, to find out if this is just another surprise he hid inside the program. I haven’t heard back from him yet.” Nog shook his head. “I hope that’s what this is, but it feels different from that. Part of it’s that Vic has been trapped in the simulation tester for so long.” Quark had prevented the lounge singer from being lost when the first Deep Space 9 had been
destroyed; Nog’s uncle had installed Vic’s matrix inside a testing device, but circumstances had prevented the singer from being uploaded to a holosuite until just recently.

  “Do you think Vic not having any interaction outside his own program could have caused this?” Candlewood set down his spoon in favor of a fork and began picking at his salad.

  “Maybe, but I don’t know,” Nog said. “That’s the biggest problem I have right now: I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I only know that Vic’s been kidnapped. I don’t know who’s taken him, where they’re holding him, or for what reason, all of which means I don’t know how to find him and successfully free him without putting him in danger.”

  “I hate to ask this,” Candlewood said as he speared a radish, “but how do you know if Vic’s even still alive after his abduction?”

  “Because if he wasn’t, I’m pretty sure the program would either reset with another main character or shut down,” Nog said. “Either way, Vic’s holomatrix would be permanently deleted.”

  Candlewood appeared to consider this. As the science officer continued his meal, Nog glanced at the covered dish of relotho larvae. He thought about eating, but he really didn’t have much of an appetite. Ever since he’d witnessed the three armed thugs forcibly remove Vic from the hotel where the lounge singer had been staying, Nog had felt sick to his stomach.

  “So how can I help?” Candlewood asked.

  “What? I thought you didn’t think much of Vic.”

  “It’s not that I don’t think much of him; it’s just that . . . well, he’s a hologram,” Candlewood said. “But you’re my friend and in obvious distress, so I’d like to help however I can.”

  “Thank you,” Nog said, grateful for the offer. While Candlewood served as the starbase’s primary science officer, he had begun his Starfleet career as a computer specialist. Nog knew his way around an isolinear core, but he thought that Candlewood could provide invaluable assistance. “Once I hear back from Knightly, we can figure out how to proceed.”