Star Trek - DS9 - Fall of Terok Nor

by Неизвестный

  Then all three Orbs were on the bar, one at each end and one dead center, all of them flashing so rapidly that they almost appeared to glow with steady lights.

  "I... think they're pretty," Rom said, beside him.

  "I think I'd like them out of my bar."

  "You know, brother, you... really should learn to take time to appreciate the wonders all around us every day."

  "That's easy for you to say. You're married to Leeta."

  "I'm serious." Rom pointed to the Orb in the middle of the countertop. "Just look at how... gloriously the light comes alive in that."

  "Are you feeling all right?" Quark asked. Whenever Rom's babbling began to veer toward poetry, Quark worried about his sibling.

  "You're not paying attention, brother. Look more closely." Rom started to push Quark forward, toward the Orb.

  "Careful there, Rom," O'Brien warned. "Don't want to knock one of those things over."

  Quark pushed himself away from his brother. "See the trouble you almost caused. These aren't play-things." Quark turned to the Red Orb directly in front of him. "They're..." He stopped as he tried to see what was inside the Orb.

  There definitely was something inside. He knew because there had been the last time he had... "Oh, this is feeling too strange," he whispered.

  "Brother?" Rom said.

  Quark peered deep within the Orb. Yes. He could

  see it now. The city in the swamp. The glowing light approaching through the trees. The...

  Quark popped open his eyes in Ferengi alarm.

  "You're not moogie!"

  He struck at the hideous monster before him, only at the last moment dimly realizing it was a reflection within a reflection within the sparkling red facets of the Orb.

  "QUARK, NO!"

  It could have been Captain Sisko who shouted. Or Jadzia or Chief O'Brien.

  It might even have been Terrell or Odo or Garak, because they had all been there that day, in one way or another.

  But by then it was too late, and Quark held the Orb in his hand and felt himself swung around through the air, as if he were dangling from a length of ODN cable stretching down from an antigrav high above the Promenade and then, when he let go and fell to the deck and looked up...

  He had no idea what he was seeing.

  Besides the Orbs, of course.

  The three of them were floating in midair, just a meter or so above the deck, spinning and glowing, each just like an Orb of the Prophets, except their lights were crimson red, flame red, blood red.

  The Orbs seemed to have moved themselves to the points of an equilateral triangle, and now twisting tendrils of light snaked out from each Orb to link up with the others. Defining the triangle's edges. Creat-ing a... glow. A darkness. A distortion of some strange type. Exactly in the middle of their forma-tion.

  Quark felt Rom drag him to his feet. He saw O'Brien try to touch one of the Orbs and he flung back in a flash of red lightning.

  He saw Jadzia standing close to the floating Orbs, aiming a tricorder at them, a sudden strong breeze tug-ging at tendrils of her hair, which fluttered past her face as if flying right into the center of the Orbs.

  "Do you feel that, brother?" Rom asked.

  Quark braced himself against the deck. Somehow, it felt as if the deck were sinking in the center of his bar, drawing everything toward it.

  The breeze was getting stronger. Now the flow of air blew into the bar, swirling napkins and debris into the center of the Orbs' pattern.

  And that debris wasn't being blown back out.

  "We've got intensive neutrino flux!" Jadzia called out over the intensifying wind. "A definite wormhole precursor!"

  "Here?!" Sisko shouted.

  Quark saw someone in a Starfleet uniform fire a phaser at one of the Orbs, but the beam suddenly dou-bled in width and flashed back at the shooter, disinte-grating him.

  And then Kai Winn and Major Kira were at the doorway of the bar, the Kai's saffron robes billowed around her.

  "Emissary!" she cried. "What have you done?!"

  And then Quark heard the deck creak as it seemed to distort even more and the station's pressure-failure sirens began to sound.

  Quark could see Sisko tapping his communicator, giving orders, looking wild.

  His brother Rom pulled on his arm, dragging him around the bar, giving the floating Orbs the widest possible berth.

  Then the lights went out, as if the entire power grid had blown.

  For a moment, the torrential wind died down and the red glow of the Orbs diminished. Quark and Rom stumbled and ran to join the last Starfleet stragglers fleeing his bar.

  Outside in the Promenade, in the dim red glow that came from the three floating Orbs in the bar- the only source of light in the station, it seemed- Quark could see he was near to Captain Sisko. Without the roar of the wind, Quark discovered he could hear again, as well. O'Brien, at Sisko's side, was saying that the Red Orbs were drawing power from the station's fusion reactors. With the power failure, they too had lost power. If they could just shut down the reactors, the Orbs would be power-less.

  "It's worth a try," Sisko said.

  And then a dark shadow passed between Quark and Sisko, and Quark saw Sisko go down, struck by a sud-den blow to the head by some crazed assailant.

  "Abandon station!" Sisko suddenly shouted. "Chief! Jadzia! Pass the order on to abandon station!"

  "What about the reactors?" O'Brien's voice was urgent.

  "Now, Chief!"

  Then the pressure alarms were replaced by a siren that Quark had only heard during drills. And never thought he'd live to hear.

  Two long bursts. Two short ones.

  The order to abandon the station had been relayed to Ops.

  In the dim light and shadows, Quark saw Sisko push himself to his feet, rubbing at his jaw. The captain

  looked around in confusion, then tapped at his chest as he shouted more orders.

  Suddenly new sources of light appeared on the Promenade.

  Golden columns of quantum mist.

  Emergency beam-outs.

  "Uh... hold on to me, brother."

  Quark felt Rom's fingernails dig into his arms. The wind began to rise again. The whole station seemed to creak and flex. The glow from the bar became brighter.

  "Rom!" O'Brien shouted. "You're with me!"

  Quark saw O'Brien lunge for Rom and grab his brother's arm just as Rom held onto Quark's

  "Chief!" Quark shouted. "What's happening?"

  "There's a wormhole opening in the station!"

  Quark felt his heart stop. A wormhole was opening in the station? A wormhole was opening in his bar!

  Quark looked past Rom and O'Brien as it seemed his bar was lit by the literal flames of hell. Gul Dukat's pride and joy, the ridiculous mural of Tholian or Tel-larite design, suddenly exploded into a spray of splin-tered glass, each glittering shard spinning madly as it was sucked down into the center of the triangle formed by the floating, glowing Orbs.

  It was the last thing Quark saw before the station flickered out of existence before him in the swirl of the transporter.

  But then, since he had lost everything, it was the last thing he ever wanted to see.

  As far as he was concerned, the legends of the Red Orbs of Jalbador were true.

  His world had come to an end.

  CHAPTER 28

  sisko jumped down from the Defiant's transporter pad and ran into the corridor and to the bridge. He could already hear the ship's impulse engines coming on line as she prepared to undock from the station.

  Worf was in the command chair and he stepped out as soon as Sisko appeared. On the main viewer, Deep Space 9 stretched out to the stars. But it was only a dark silhouette against the Denorios Belt. All station lights were out.

  "How did you get the order to evacuate?" Sisko asked, slipping into his chair.

  "It came into Ops through Jadzia," Worf said. He was already at tactical. "More than one thousand peo-ple are already away."
>
  Sisko knew just how fortunate the inhabitants and crew of the station were. With the two Akira-class star-ships Admiral Ross had dispatched to help with the

  evacuation, more than twelve banks of transporters were operating at once. And the main personnel banks on the Garneau and the Bondar could retrieve more than one hundred evacuees every minute between them.

  Jadzia and O'Brien were next on the bridge, fol-lowed by Bashir and Kira.

  Bashir held a medical tricorder to Sisko and Sisko winced, suddenly realizing his jaw hurt.

  "How's that feel?" the doctor asked.

  "You should see the other guy," Sisko quipped. He didn't know with whom he had collided during the evacuation, but this wasn't the time to worry about it.

  "Oh, Prophets!"

  Sisko leaned forward with a smile. The exclamation had come from Commander Arla at flight operations, the least religious Bajoran he had yet to meet.

  But before he could say anything to her about her apparent change in faith, he saw what she saw on the viewer and all sense of amusement fled.

  A large glowing sphere of red energy blossomed over a section of the Promenade, just below Ops.

  "What is that?" Sisko asked.

  "The wormhole precursor," Jadzia replied. "It must have found a new source of power, because it's contin-uing to accelerate."

  "Worf! What's the status of the evacuation?"

  "Fifteen hundred people away," Worf reported. "But there is growing gravimetric distortion interfering with-"

  Worf fell silent as a chorus of gasps filled the bridge.

  The section of the habitat ring closest to the grow-ing red sphere of energy was beginning to buckle, bending like a broken wheel.

  Sisko stared at the screen in sickened fascination. "How many people are still on board... ?"

  "Communications are down, sir. We must with-draw."

  "Release the docking clamps," he ordered.

  Arla fumbled with her console until Kira touched the young Bajoran commander on her shoulder and swiftly took over the position.

  On the viewer, three escape modules launched from the habitat ring, but instead of flying free of the sta-tion they were drawn on perfect arcs into the red sphere.

  "This can't be happening," Bashir said in shock. " The impact of the three modules set off a series of explosions that ringed the Promenade, and in a chain reaction they traveled up the central core to Ops.

  "Jake..." Sisko whispered, as if an icy hand clutched his heart,' then spoke more strongly, "Did anyone see Jake?"

  "He's on board," Bashir said at once.

  "What about Kasidy?"

  Sisko's heart sank. No one had seen her on the Defi-ant. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair. Surely with the combined might of all the vessels using transporters now, Kasidy had been among the lucky ones.

  A new wave of horrified gasps escaped those observing the viewer as a section of the habitat ring broke off and fell up into the red sphere.

  "We are beginning to experience tidal distortions from an intense gravitational source," Worf announced.

  Then Jadzia made her report. "It's a wormhole, Ben-jamin. For some reason it's opening about a hundred

  times more slowly than the one we're used to, but it is opening."

  "Get us out of here, Major."

  "Aye, sir."

  On the viewer, the image of Deep Space 9-what was left of it-angled abruptly as the Defiant banked away.

  And then the Starship shook violently as the viewer flared with blue energy.

  "We are under attack!" Worf shouted.

  "Full power to shields!" Sisko ordered. He knew it had to be the Jem'Hadar. The Dominion had finally reacted to-

  "You're not going anywhere," Leej Terrell said from the viewer.

  Sisko leapt to his feet to face her. He recognized the bridge of her Sagittarian cruiser. "Mr. Worf, lock on all weapons," he said.

  "I cannot acquire a target."

  On the viewer, Terrell was a study in triumphant rage. She pounded a fist on the arm of her looming command chair. "Go back to your station, Captain. You found the third Orb. Now you must join it."

  "I thought you wanted the Orbs for yourself," Sisko said, trying to goad her, as he had so recently, so long ago.

  "If Cardassia can't have them, then no one can. Fire!"

  Instantly the Defiant shook under another fusillade of phaser fire.

  "Worf! Where is she!"

  "Her ship is cloaked, sir! I can pick up a slight mod-ulation when she fires, but not enough to extrapolate a course."

  "Where did a Cardassian ship get a cloaking device?" Sisko demanded to know.

  The Defiant trembled as another round of phaser fire found her.

  Then Sisko heard the ship's own capacitors dis-charge with return fire.

  "I believe I hit her," Worf called out. "I will con-tinue to-"

  The biggest blast yet hit the Defiant, and the ship spun on her axis.

  Each time DS9 slipped past the viewer, the red sphere was larger. Now Sisko could see the rotating vortex was composed of red spiraling tendrils of energy. In form, it looked just like the wormhole he had seen open so many times. Only its color was dif-ferent.

  "Major Kira," Sisko said. "We need to be stabilized so Worf can return fire."

  "She's picked her targets," Kira warned. "Our thrusters are off-line. Impulse is out. All we've got is warp and that's not powered up yet."

  "Working on it, sir!" O'Brien volunteered before he had been asked.

  "Can we get support from another ship?" Sisko asked.

  "All channels are down," Jadzia said. "The other ships are withdrawing."

  "How can that be? Surely they can see we're in dif-ficulty!"

  Jadzia turned from her science station to Sisko. "Benjamin, we're so close to that wormhole we could be within some kind of event horizon. Those other ships might not even know we're still here."

  O'Brien chimed in. "That could explain why the

  wormhole seems to be opening so slowly. Those other ships might have seen it move as quickly as the blue wormhole does. And we might have been sucked in."

  Sisko tried to follow the reasoning of his two experts. "So we're in some kind of temporal bubble?"

  "Not necessarily," Jadzia said. "It could be straight-forward relativistic time displacement We should be able to warp out when the engines are ready, just like jumping out of a black hole."

  "Thirty seconds to warp," O'Brien reported.

  The Defiant shuddered as another volley hit her, then rang with her own phasers as Worf once more returned fire. "I think I may have hit her again," Worf said.

  "Twenty seconds to warp," O'Brien counted down.

  On the viewer, the red wormhole now obscured more than half of DS9. Sisko watched as the station's upper docking pylons begin to twist down to the red distortion, hull plates popping loose like autumn leaves in a storm. Then one of the pylons broke free entirely as an explosion engulfed its base. It tumbled into the wormhole, visibly breaking up into still smaller pieces. Then it disappeared.

  Another explosion shook the Defiant. Translator sparks erupted from Worf's tactical station and the Klingon had to jump back as the automatic fire-suppression system engulfed his console with anaero-bic vapor.

  "Ten seconds," O'Brien said.

  "Major," Sisko ordered, "prepare to get us out of here."

  Another hit.

  "Shields at thirty-seven percent," Kira announced. "We can't take much more."

  And then on the viewer, as if it were no more than a crumpled piece of tissue being pulled down a drain, Deep Space 9 fell in on itself, shattering like brittle ice, each shard drawn spinning into the endless, infi-nite tunnel of the red wormhole at its heart.

  Sisko felt a part of himself vanishing into that rav-enous maw, to be lost forever along with his station.

  "They all got off in time," he chanted softly to him-self, willing his words to be true. "They had to get off in time."

&nbs
p; "We have warp!" O'Brien announced.

  On screen, the red wormhole continued to expand, continued to open, its unwinding coils of negative energy now reaching out for the Defiant.