by Judith
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