Ro quickly took in the scene. Directly in front of her, Nog stood with Lieutenant Commander Candlewood and Quark’s employee on one side of the room, along with Vic Fontaine, who appeared to have been badly beaten. On the other side of the room, seven men in suits faced the quartet. The largest of them held a knife threateningly in one hand.
“Who the hell are you?” asked one of the men, while another asked where they had come from. At the same time, at least four of the men drew firearms.
Ro didn’t hesitate. She had no idea what was going on, but she knew that the only one in danger in that room was Vic Fontaine. Ro turned to Remzi, grabbed the box from her hand, and pulled out the silver band inside. She opened the device and clamped it around Vic’s arm, then hauled him backward and out through the door. She half expected the singer to vanish as he passed over the threshold, but he didn’t. Ro saw Quark’s eyes widen as Vic Fontaine stepped for the first time onto the deck of Deep Space 9.
viii
* * *
Nog didn’t know what had happened or how it had happened, but he suspected it had to do with whatever plot Morn had hatched in his attempt to save Vic. Astoundingly, it seemed to have worked, with the singer actually leaving the holosuite but remaining intact. Across the room, Calderone and his men looked on in confusion, but then Nog saw the mobster turn his attention back to him, Candlewood, and Lani. “Kill them,” he said, and his thugs aimed their weapons.
Nog grabbed Candlewood and Lani and pulled them bodily toward the door. “Computer, save and end program,” the operations chief said.
As the suite at the Shining Oasis vanished, taking Calderone and his men with it, Nog suddenly realized that he might have doomed Vic. When he looked down the corridor outside the holosuite, though, he still saw the singer. Nog quickly went to him.
“Captain,” the operations chief said. “What’s going on? How is this possible?”
Ro pointed to the silver band she had affixed around Vic’s arm. “A mobile, self-contained holo-emitter,” she said. Then the captain addressed the two other men with her. “What do you intend to do with Mister Fontaine?” she asked.
The Vulcan stepped forward and produced a pair of wrist restraints. “For the moment,” the man said, “he is under arrest.”
ix
* * *
He heard movement first, and then voices. They sounded distant, as though away in another room. He could not make out words, but he heard a tone and a way of speaking that he recognized.
Anora, he thought, and he knew that he missed her terribly. He didn’t recall what had happened or where he was, but he remembered Anora—her lovely features, her flowing auburn tresses, her deep, dark eyes. He remembered her, and he missed her.
Altek opened his eyes. He lay on his back, and he saw above him a ceiling he did not recognize. I’m not in my house, and not in the hospital in Joradell, he thought. And obviously not in the caves beneath the Merzang Mountains. Altek turned his head and—
It all rushed in on him at once, the five months of his exile, the strange new world in which he found himself. Mourning his lost past. Acclimating himself to the future. Falling for Laren. Suddenly finding Anora with him—Nerys.
And the falsework.
Altek pushed himself up, swept aside the sheet atop him, and swung his legs from the padded platform on which he lay. He was on one of the ships that had carried the scientists and the vedeks and the others down from the surface of Endalla. He could see nothing but darkness through the port in the opposite bulkhead, making him think that he hadn’t been taken from the great chasm that led down to the falsework.
“Dans,” a familiar voice said, and Altek looked to his left to see Kira Nerys in the doorway. She quickly stepped aside and allowed an older man to edge past her. He had a weathered face, graying hair, and an especially long column of folds on the bridge of his nose. He wore a Bajoran Militia uniform.
As the man reached for an instrument on a shelf beside Altek’s platform, Kira said, “This is Doctor Rhyne Ashek.”
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked. He activated the device and worked its controls, slowly moving it around Altek’s body.
“Like I just got run over by a Bajoran moon,” Altek said with a chuckle.
The doctor smiled, but it appeared reflexive rather than genuine. “Seriously, young man,” he said, “how do you feel?”
Altek took a deep breath and tried to assess himself. He flexed his arms and legs, shifted his body. “I’ve got some aches and pains,” he said. “Nothing too bad, but . . . my energy is low. I feel almost like I’ve been electrically shocked. My thoughts are coming a little more slowly than usual, as though I’m a bit dazed.”
Rhyne nodded. “These readings support that,” he said. “I’m detecting some unusual synaptic potentials in your brain, which suggests you might have had a pagh’tem’far, but most of what I see points to something approximating an Orb experience.”
“Yes,” Altek said, remembering back to his previous existence, when Veralla Sil had shown him the Tear of Destiny before Keev Anora had left to deliver it to Shavalla. “Yes, it felt very much like that . . . unreal . . . no . . . more like hyper-real. And overwhelming.”
“We all felt it,” Kira said. “Everybody inside the chamber. But, again, you were the only one who lost consciousness, and . . .”
“What?” Altek asked when Kira seemed reluctant to continue.
“And it was you who caused it,” Kira said. “You placed your hands in indentations in the wall—”
“Yes!” Altek exclaimed, jumping to his feet as he recalled the event. “I saw the shapes of hands . . . my hands . . .” A wave of dizziness overtook him, as though he had stood up too fast. He teetered, and both Kira and the doctor helped him to sit back down on the platform.
“No quick movements like that,” Rhyne said. “I don’t think you need any medication or treatment, but I’d like you to get some rest.”
“Of course,” Altek said.
“I’ll make sure he does, Doctor,” Kira said. “Thank you.”
Rhyne shut off the medical device and placed it back on the shelf. As he moved to leave, Altek thanked him. Once he’d gone, Kira sat down on the platform beside him.
“Do you remember what happened?” she asked gently.
He shrugged. “We were watching the two scientists examining that one section of wall, and then I . . . sensed . . . something. I felt something pulling me—” He touched a finger to the side of his head. “—in here. I wasn’t being controlled, but I felt compelled to move. Maybe impelled would be a better description. I walked to that oddly angular intersection of surfaces, and that’s when I first perceived the imprints of hands there. They began to glow, and when I put my hands up, I saw that they precisely matched.”
“I saw that too,” Kira said. “It was as though they had been made specifically for you.”
“It felt like that,” Altek said. “Especially because the previous night, when I got lightheaded and fell, I saw a vision of glowing hands.”
Kira abruptly stood up. “This is why you’re here,” she said. “The Prophets showed you that vision so that you would be drawn to the imprints of the hands . . . so that you would place your hands there and activate the display of the comet.”
“But . . . what does it all mean?”
“I don’t know,” Kira said. “The imprints that you set your hands in . . . they’re gone now. After what occurred, the chamber was evacuated, but a few of the scientists have returned now. Where you were standing when everything happened, they can find only flat, smooth surfaces. Other than you and me, apparently nobody else saw the imprints.”
Altek shook his head. “Disappearing imprints of my hands, hundreds or maybe thousands of years in the future,” he said. “And I’ve somehow been sent to this time so that I could set my hands there, but for what reason? To se
e a comet die as it plunged into Bajor’s atmosphere? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Kira said again. They stayed quiet for a few moments, each lost to their own thoughts. Finally, Kira said, “There in the chamber, it seemed so realistic, almost like a holographic recording. I remember it so vividly. I was just a child, and we were in the Singha refugee camp, but my father let my brothers and me stay up late every night for a few weeks to watch it. They called it the Temple Comet because it shined brightest each night with the constellation of the Temple behind it.”
“Are you saying that you actually saw that comet in your youth?” Altek asked. His mouth had gone dry.
“Yes,” Kira said. “I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but yes.”
“You saw it?” Altek asked. “Kira Nerys, not Keev Anora?”
“Yes, I saw it as Kira Nerys,” she said. “A lot of Bajorans saw it. I spoke to some of the scientists about it after we got you medical help. We all agreed it was a re-creation, if not a recording, of when the Temple Comet disintegrated upon entering Bajor’s atmosphere.”
“I don’t understand how that can be,” Altek said. “I saw the same comet from the backyard of my childhood home in Joradell. But if I came from so far back in the past, how could that be?” Altek tried to wrap his mind around the implications. “The odds of two such distinctive but identical comets, in two different time periods, seem so unlikely as to be impossible.”
Kira leaned heavily against the bulkhead, as though she had been winded. “Not two identical comets,” she said. “The same comet, not in two different time periods, but in two different universes.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you’re not from the past,” Kira told him. “You’re from a parallel universe. We witnessed the same astronomical phenomenon that somehow spanned both realities. That means that your childhood and my childhood were contemporaneous.”
Altek had trouble even imagining what Kira proposed. “Even if that’s true, I don’t understand it, or what I have to do with any of this.”
Kira pushed away from the bulkhead and walked back over to sit beside Altek again. “You arrived here from the wormhole,” she said. “That means that the wormhole exists in your universe as well as ours. But since the Bajor in your reality had only four moons, since it had no version of Endalla, that means that the wormhole existed in your universe without a falsework upon which it was constructed. It stands to reason, then, that what the Ohalavaru uncovered here on Endalla is not a falsework for the Celestial Temple. Whatever it is, it has some other purpose.”
“But what does that mean?” Altek wanted to know.
“It means that you have been sent here, from your universe to ours, to refute the Ohalavaru claims,” Kira said. “Dans, you are a Hand of the Prophets.”
x
* * *
Ro sat in a chair in the security office on the Plaza, facing a large viewscreen that showed images from all two dozen of the facility’s detention cells. Nog and Doctor Remzi occupied the seats beside her. On the display, in the lower left-hand corner, Ensign Ernak gov Ansarg appeared, leading Corvok and Toulet into the detention area. Vic Fontaine stood between the two Federation Security agents.
Even though Remzi had told Ro about the mobile emitter, its operation still impressed her. It felt odd enough to see Vic in a setting outside his old-Earth Las Vegas lounge, but it seemed surreal to watch a holographic character walk about Deep Space 9. Ro wondered what implications the technology would have in the wider Federation.
On the viewer, Ansarg went to a detention cell and stepped aside, allowing Corvok and Toulet to escort Vic inside. Once they had, Ansarg activated the cell’s force field. The agents released Vic from his wrist restraints, and the singer went over to the room’s lone sleeping platform and sat down on it.
“Ventor, isolate the cell Ernak just activated,” Ro said. At the security office’s main console, Lieutenant Bixx acknowledged the order and worked the controls. A moment later, the view of Vic’s cell expanded to fill the display.
The singer looked terrible. As Ro had led Corvok, Toulet, and their prisoner to the security office, Nog had explained the sequence of events that had resulted in Vic’s injuries. He began with Morn giving the singer worthless financial instruments to prop up an in-program debt, and ended with a hoodlum ordering one of his men to cut out Vic’s vocal cords.
After Nog had told his story, Doctor Remzi had asked a number of questions. She focused primarily on Vic Fontaine’s personality traits, but she also wanted to know about the particular nature of the overall holoprogram. Remzi seemed less interested in the expansiveness of the code, which Ro considered impressive, and more about its constraints.
On the display, Corvok said, “Your name is Vic Fontaine?”
“Yeah,” Vic said. He sat with his hands in his lap and his head down. “Who are you?”
Corvok and Toulet looked at each other in a way that suggested they had never even considered introducing themselves to a hologram. “I am Corvok,” the Vulcan said, “and this is Amadou Toulet. We are agents with Federation Security.”
“I figured as much when you handcuffed me and locked me in jail,” Vic said. He sounded as though he could not speak normally because of the swelling on his face. “Don’t I get a chance to make a phone call?”
Corvok and Toulet again regarded each other, that time in obvious confusion.
“A phone call,” Vic repeated. “So I can contact a lawyer. Or doesn’t the Federation allow people they arrest to have legal representation?”
“For the moment,” Toulet said, “you haven’t been charged with a crime.”
“So then I don’t need a lawyer because I’m free to go?” Vic stood up. When he did, Ro again noted the battering his face had taken.
“Please sit down,” Corvok said.
“Right,” Vic said, slumping back down onto the sleeping platform. “That’s what I thought.”
“Your face,” Toulet said. “That isn’t what you normally look like, is it?”
“I can’t see my face, pallie,” Vic said, “but from the way it feels and the way my mouth is forming words, I’m guessing no, I don’t usually look like this.”
“Why don’t you change it back, then?” Toulet asked. “Reconfigure your physical matrix.”
“Because I need to heal for that to happen, Einstein,” Vic said. “I might be a light bulb, but even a light bulb can’t just change the color it gives off.”
“By ‘light bulb,’ ” Corvok said, “do you mean that you are a hologram?”
“Yeah, I’m a hologram,” Vic said, sounding annoyed. “What of it? I see your pointed ears, but I don’t go askin if you’re a Vulcan.”
If Corvok took any offense at the comment, he hid it well. “It is unusual for a character in a holographic program to know that it is a hologram,” he said.
“Yeah, so?” Vic said. “I can only speak for myself.”
“You are aware that you are a hologram,” Corvok said, “but you are now outside any holographic environment. That does not seem to surprise you. Why?”
Vic made a fist with one hand and rapped it against the silver band circling his upper arm. “I’m not surprised because I assume this is a mobile holographic emitter.”
“Then you know about the mobile emitter?” Corvok asked.
“You know, I’m not sure if it’s because you’re a Vulcan or because you’re in law enforcement,” Vic said, “but you don’t seem to have much of a grasp on the obvious.”
Apparently undeterred, Corvok said, “But the mobile emitter is restricted technology.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who put this on me.”
“But did you want somebody to put that on you?” Toulet asked.
“So you’re interrogating my desires?” Vic said. “Should I confess to the dreams I have about
Ann-Margret?”
“I will be more direct,” Corvok said. “Did you hire Morn to acquire a mobile emitter for you?”
“Me?” Vic said, and he rolled his eyes—or at least he rolled his one eye not swollen shut. “First of all, how could I possibly hire anybody outside a holosuite? I don’t have any cash or belongings that have any value outside my program.”
“That isn’t a denial,” Toulet noted.
“Fine,” Vic said. “Then I’ll deny it outright: I didn’t hire Morn or anybody else to dig up one of these things for me.”
“But you knew of its existence,” Corvok said, more statement than question.
“Yeah, I did,” Vic admitted. “But it’s not like I’m the only one. The emitter might be restricted technology, but it’s not like its existence is top secret. My program has access to public files—at least, it did back on the old bicycle wheel.”
“On the what?” Toulet asked.
“Sorry,” Vic said. “On the old Deep Space Nine. I used to monitor public files, keep up on what was goin on out in the big, wide universe.”
“Are you claiming that you know about the mobile emitter from public sources?” Corvok asked.
“Yeah,” Vic said.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Corvok said.
“I’d tell you I’m not programmed to lie, but that’d be a lie in itself,” Vic said. He shrugged. “Look, I can’t tell you if it’s been publicly reported directly—I didn’t monitor everything—but it’s certainly been evident by implication. There’s an emergency medical hologram who’s walking around out there. He was first installed aboard a Starfleet vessel called Voyager, but he later joined a think tank, he testified at a rights trial for an android, and then he worked for the Federation Research Institute. It doesn’t take a genius to know that there weren’t holographic projectors installed in all the places he’s been.”
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