by Judith
you're out of uniform, Nog."
Nog laughed with affection. "Look who's talking, Jean-Luc."
Fleet Admiral Jean-Luc Picard—the beloved Old Man to Ms staff—joined in the
laughter. "I was in the sonic shower when—" He doubled over, coughing.
Immediately, Nog pulled from the couch a blanket untouched by Romulan blood, and
draped it carefully around the Old Man's sharp-boned shoulders. Fittingly, Nog
saw, the blanket was woven with the old Starfleet emblem and the name and
registration of Picard's last ship command: the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-F.
Nog reached for the bat'leth. "Maybe I should take that."
The Old Man stared at the weapon for a few moments, as if wondering how it came
to be in his hands.
"That's the one Worf gave you, isn't it?" Nog asked gently.
The Old Man seemed relieved. "That's right." He handed the bat'leth to Nog. "How
is Worf? Have you heard from him on Deep Space 9?"
Nog kept his smile steady. He had already conferred with Starfleet Medical on
this: The Old Man was in the secondary stages of Irumodic Syndrome, a
degenerative disorder linked to a progressive and incurable deterioration of
the synaptic pathways. The doctors had told Nog that the Old Man's short-term
memory would be first to show signs of disruption, and that's just what had
happened. It had become common this past year for the admiral to forget the
names of the newer researchers who had joined Project Phoenix. But now, as the
project drew nearer its absolute deadline and the unrelenting pressure mounted,
it was distressing to see that the Old Man also seemed to be having more and
more difficulty recalling events that had occurred years, even decades, before.
"Worf is dead, Jean-Luc," Nog said quietly. "When Deep Space 9—"
The Old Man's eyes widened. "—was destroyed.
That's right" He licked his dry Ups, pulled the blanket of his last command more
tightly around his shoulders. "That's when it all started, you know."
Nog understood what the Old Man meant. Everyone in what was left of the
Federation did. With the destruction of Deep Space 9 and the discovery of the
second wormhole in Bajoran space, all the conditions that had led to this
terrible state of siege had been set in place.
"I was there when it happened," Nog reminded him.
Late at night, the memories of that last day, that last hour on DS9, that last
minute before he had been beamed out to the [7.5.5. Garneau, were as vivid to
Nog as if they had happened only hours earlier, as if he were still in his
youth, still only an ensign.
Back then, back there, he had been working in Ops with Garak and Jadzia,
painstakingly restoring the station's computers. Then something had happened in
his uncle's bar. Captain Sisko had asked for Jadzia's help, for Chief O'Brien's
help, even for Nog's father's help. But he had not asked for Nog's.
Less than an hour later, the gravimetric structure of space had suddenly
distorted, and every warning light and siren in Ops had gone off at once as the
order came to abandon the station. Even now, Nog was still unable to make sense
of the readings he had seen at the time. Only after the fact had he learned that
a wormhole had opened unnaturally slowly in his uncle's bar on the Promenade.
After the fact, he had learned that a few survivors from the Promenade had been
beamed aboard the rescue flotilla, with stories describing how the three Red
Orbs of Jalbador had moved into alignment by themselves, somehow triggering the
wormhole's appearance.
But in the confusion of those final moments, Nog had been left with the mystery
of the sensors, watching uncomprehendingly as transport indicators showed the
start of mass beam-outs, and—inexplicably—a handful of beam-ins.
Then, only seconds from the end, when the station's power had failed, plunging
all of Ops into momentary darkness before the emergency batteries came on-line,
Nog had heard Jake Sisko's voice as if he were calling out from far away. He
remembered spinning around, already so close to panic that only Garak's eerily
calm example had kept him focused on his work of dropping shields according to
emergency evacuation procedures in order to permit as many transports as
possible.
But when he had turned in answer to Jake's call— that was when Nog had screamed
as only a Ferengi could. Because Jake was only centimeters behind him.
Jake had reached out to him then, silently mouthing Nog's name as if he were
shouting as loudly as he could. To his perpetual regret, Nog had drawn back from
his friend in fear. His abrupt move caused him to stumble back over his stool,
begin to fall, and when he landed, he was on a cargo-transporter on the Garneau.
Two muscle-bound lieutenants had dragged him off the array so quickly, one of
his arms had been dislocated, the other deeply bruised. And by the time a
harried-looking medical technician had finally gotten to him, everything was
over.
Deep Space 9.
The Defiant.
His father, his uncle, and his best friend, Jake.
Gone. Snuffed out. The void within him the equal of the one that had swallowed
everyone he had loved.
"I was there when it happened," Nog said again. "When everyone died."
That sudden flash of a smile came to the Old Man again. "Oh, no. They didn't
die, Nog."
But Nog knew that theory, too. And he didn't accept it If there was any hope for
the Federation, for the galaxy, for the universe itself, that hope rested
instead with Project Phoenix and the brilliance of Jean-Luc Picard, however
much that brilliance was compromised. What needed to be done now—the only thing
that could be done—was something that only the Old Man had accomplished before;
at least, he was the only star-ship captain alive today who had accomplished it.
And Nog, and everyone else who had sacrificed and struggled to make Jean-Luc
Picard's Phoenix a reality, continued to believe he could do it again. They had
to believe.
Fifteen more standard days, Nog thought. All he had to do was keep the Old Man
calm and stress-free for 360 more hours. Keep the Old Man's peridaxon levels up.
Make sure he slept and ate as his medical team determined was necessary, and
the Phoenix would fly and the nightmare would end. Failure was unacceptable— and
unthinkable.
"Jean-Luc, Captain Sisko was lost with the Defiant. They were all lost. And now
the Federation is counting on you, and science. Not some ancient prophecy."
The Old Man stood in the middle of his sitting room, shaking his head like a
patient teacher addressing a confused student. "You know ... you know people
used to fight over whether or not a photon was a wave or a particle. Centuries
ago they used to think it had the characteristics of both, and depending which
character-
istic an experiment was set up to find, that's the characteristic that was
revealed."
It might have been a long time ago, but Nog still remembered the science
history classes he had taken at the Academy. He was familiar with the muddled
early beginnings of multiphysics, when scientists had first encountere
d
quantum effects and had lacked the basic theory to understand them as anything
more than apparently contradictory phenomena. He knew that the old physicists'
mistake had not been in trying to determine the nature of light as particle or
wave, but in thinking it had to be only one or the other. Fortunately, the
blinding simplicity of the Hawking Recursive-Dimension Interpretation had taken
care of that fallacy, and all apparent quantum contradictions had disappeared
from the equations overnight, opening the door to applied quantum engineering
for everything from faster-than-light communication to the Heisenberg
compensators used in every transporter and replicator system to this day.
"The debate over the nature of light is ancient history," Nog said kindly. "Not
science. Certainly not prophecy."
Another tremor shook the floor beneath them. Longer and more sustained man the
others that had preceded it Nog looked away from the Old Man as his ears picked
up a distant, high-pitched whistle, something he doubted any hew-mon would be
able to hear. To him, it could mean only one thing: The atmospheric forcefields
were down.
"But the way the question was resolved," the Old Man insisted. "That's what's
applicable today."
Nog quickly slipped one of the vacuum-compressed emergency suits off his wrist,
tugged on the loop to break the seal, and in less than a second shook out a
crinkly, semitransparent blue jumpsuit. "Here, Jean-Luc. We'd better put these
on."
"Y'see," the Old Man said, as he stepped agonizingly slowly into one leg of the
suit, then the other, "the conflict between particle and wave was resolved when
it was discovered that the real answer united both aspects. Different sides of
the same coin."
Nog slipped the blanket from Picard's shoulders and helped pull both the Old
Man's sleeves on, making sure the admiral's hands reached to the mitt-like ends.
"Same thing with ancient prophecy and science," the Old Man explained.
Nog smoothed out the flaps of Picard's suit opening, then pressed them together
so the molecular adhesors created an airtight seal. All that remained now was to
pull up the hood hanging down the Old Man's back, seal that to the suit, then
twist the small metal cylinder at the suit's neck, which would inflate the face
mask to provide the admiral with ten minutes of emergency air while at the same
time transmitting a transporter distress beacon.
Though he estimated the atmospheric pressure in the personnel dome would hold
for the next minute or two, Nog didn't want to take any chances with the Old
Man. Swiftly, he positioned Picard's hood, sealed it, then twisted the cylinder
so that a clear bubble of micro-thin polymer formed around the Old Man's face.
"Science and ancient prophecy," the admiral shouted through the mask, undeterred
by all of Nog's minister-ings. "Look deeply enough, and who's to say both aren't
different aspects of the same thing? Just like particle and wave!"
Even as Nog shook out his own suit, quickly donning and sealing it, the
admiral's words had a chilling
effect on Mm. The Ascendancy's propaganda had won it dozens of worlds
already—fifty-two to be exact, according to the latest intelligence estimates.
If those falsehoods were to reach the workers of Project Phoenix, perhaps the
project would survive. But if they infected Admiral Picard... Nog didn't even
want to think of the consequences.
Nog hesitated before pulling his own hood over his head. Fortunately, the
pressure suits were designed to fit up to a 200-kilogram Tellarite, so there
would be ample room even for a Ferengi head and ears. "Jean-Luc, you can't allow
yourself to be distracted by Ascendancy lies. You have to concentrate on
finishing die Phoenix." "But they're not lies," Picard replied indignantly. Nog
put his hands on the Old Man's shoulders, and their suits crackled like a
blazing campfire. "Jean-Luc, please. Remember what you've been telling us since
the project began. The Ascendancy will do anything, say anything, to divert us
from our course."
Picard patted Nog's hand on his left shoulder. "But that was before, Will."
"Before what?" Nog didn't bother to correct the Old Man. When he was tired or
confused, the admiral often thought Nog was his old first officer from the
Enterprise-D and E, Will Riker. Another casualty of '88.
"Before this attack!" The Old Man spread his arms grandly, and Nog noticed that
both his suit and Picard's had begun to expand slightly, obviously in response
to reduced air pressure in the dome.
Nog checked the ready light on the small metal cylinder on his own suit. The
emergency beacon was transmitting. The automatic search-and-rescue equipment
installed throughout the Utopia Planitia Fleet
Yards was designed to be activated by the first sign of falling air pressure. By
now, Nog knew, sensors throughout the domes should be locking onto emergency
beacons and activating automatic short-range transporters to beam personnel to
underground shelters.
"What's so special about this attack?"
"It's fifteen days!" the Old Man said. "Don't you see? It's no coincidence
they're attacking now! It's a diversion. To keep us from the truth."
"What truth?" Nog shouted. The air outside his suit was thinning rapidly, and
the Old Man's voice was fading.
"They've come back!" the Old Man said. "It's the only explanation."
Then, before Nog could offer an alternate explanation of his own, he was
relieved to see the Old Man begin to dissolve in a transporter beam, followed a
moment later by the transformation into light of the admiral's quarters. They
were both being beamed away.
But as their new location took shape around them, Nog realized with a start that
they hadn't been beamed to safety in the underground shelters.
Martian gravity had been replaced by Class-M normal.
He and the Old Man were no longer in the shipyards, and the people surrounding
them were not Starfleet emergency-evacuation personnel.
They were Romulans.
And this close to the end of the universe, Nog knew that Romulans could only
want one thing.
The death of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.
CHAPTER 3
sometimes, Julian Bashir remembered what it was like to be normal.
But such bittersweet memories were suspect, because they were invariably mixed
in with disjointed recollections of his early childhood, from his first faint
glimmerings of self-awareness to age six. For the rest of his childhood—that is,
everything beyond age 6 years plus 142 days—there were, of course, no
disjointed recollections, only perfect recall. Because on the one hundred
forty-third day of his seventh year of existence he had awakened in the
suffocating gel of an amino-diffusion bam, with an illegally altered genetic
structure. On that day everything had changed—not just within the boy he had
been, but within the universe that had previously surrounded him.
In fact, sometimes it seemed to Bashir that the innocent male child who had
been born to his parents thirty-
four years ago had peris
hed in that back-alley gene mill on Adigeon Prime, and
that he—the altered creature who now called himself Julian Bashir—was in fact a
changeling of old Earth legends.
Little Julian—the terrified boy who had been immersed in the diffusion bath
with no idea what he had done wrong to make his parents punish him in such a
way—had been undeniably slow to learn throughout his entire, brief life. His
environment had been a constant marvel to him, because so much of it was simply
beyond his natural capacity to comprehend. His beloved stuffed bear, Kukalaka,
had been no less alive to him than his mother's cruelly nipping and yipping
Martian terriers. To little Julian, it had been obvious that the various
computer interfaces in his home contained little people who could speak to him.
And he had only been able to watch in wonder as the other children at his school
somehow answered questions or accomplished tasks with abilities
indistinguishable to him from magic.
One recollection that most often resurfaced when least wanted from those blurry,
half-remembered days of dull normalcy, was of standing in his school's playroom
listening to Naomi Pedersen chant the times table. To little Julian there had
been absolutely no connection between the numerals that floated above the
holoboard and the words that his classmate sang out. The disconnect had been so
profound that Bashir clearly remembered his early, untransformed self not even
attempting to understand what was going on: Naomi was simply uttering random
noises, and the squiggles above the holoboard were only unrelated doodles.
From his present vantage point, Bashir regarded those days of simple
incomprehension as the peace of
innocence. They marked a time when he was unaware that life was a continuing
straggle, a never-ending series of problems to be overcome by those equipped to
recognize and solve them.
Now he recognized that same peace of incomprehension in most of the fourteen
others with whom he had just been transported from the Defiant, and he envied
them their unknowing normalcy.
But, incapable of giving in to what he suspected was their hopeless situation,
Bashir still studied his surroundings. He and the others were standing together
in what appeared to be a familiar setting: the hangar deck of a Starfleet
