Repulsed by the phaser’s blunt impact, the Jem’Hadar fell backward against the unyielding bedrock, so much dead weight. Nog wanted to look away, but discovered he couldn’t. He squinted in the shadows at the supine corpse’s pebble-textured face.
Nog recognized it. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that he’d seen this particular Jem’Hadar’s face before, many times. He remembered that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. It made no sense, but this sensation of quasi-memory felt more profoundly real than even his evanescent, dreamlike recollections of Starfleet.
He considered the reassuring heft of the phaser in his hand. Starfleet issue, he decided, not at all certain how he knew that fact either. Perhaps he hadbeen in Starfleet. Maybe that was why using this thing had come so naturally to him. And perhaps it also explained why he recognized this strange place, where some shadow-Nog had lost a leg in some all but forgotten Dominion War battle.
Maybe I’ve been hurt. Lost my memory.
Misaligned.
In.
The.
World.
Lines.
Sacagawea’s translator-mediated voice, like a glebbeningrainstorm made of latinum slips, came back to him. And he remembered. He was in the cathedral now. Or the anathema.
He had beamed inside the alien artifact.
He tried to reassure himself that everything he was experiencing in here was probably not objectively real. It had to be the artifact acting on his mind. Or his own mind trying to come to terms with an infinite number of alternate Nogs across an infinite number of parallel worlds.
So why do I think I’m in the Chin’toka System, of all places?
The footfalls were much closer now. His pursuers would be on top of him soon. Nog started to throw himself into motion once again, responding to Ferengi instincts honed by untold aeons of evolution.
He stopped. Maybe running wasn’t the way to fix Sacagawea’s worldlines, he thought. He heard his uncle’s voice again, pleading with him to flee, the way any sensible Ferengi would. They’re going to take your leg again. Unless you run. On your two good legs.
The Jem’Hadar footfalls continued growing louder as a new thought chilled him: Was losing his leg the only way to remained “tethered,” to borrow Sacagawea’s word, to the correct universe? Or perhaps it was the price of restoring Ezri, Dax, and Dr. Bashir to their normal condition. He was an engineer. He knew that nature was, in its own way, an excellent model of the Ferengi way of life. It always balanced the books, and it never gave anything away without eventually demanding payment. Usually with interest.
He looked down at his left leg again, and thought of his absent friends.
Then he smiled. So be it.
The sound of his own pulse nearly drowning out the rising din of the approaching Jem’Hadar, Nog planted his feet in the dust and raised his phaser toward his still-concealed pursuers.
“Sorry, Uncle,” he said out loud, his voice sounding flat in the stale, stagnant air. “It looks like my running days are over. In more ways than one.”
Another Jem’Hadar appeared from behind the same outcropping that had produced the first. A second and a third followed hard on his heels. Nog fired and fired again. Three times. Five times. Still more Jem’Hadar filed into view from behind the rocks, moving closer, contemptuous of the death Nog dispensed. Corpses fell in twisted heaps, and still more Jem’Hadar leaped over them, approaching faster than Nog could kill them. The press of hostile flesh was now only a few meters away, and every soldier in the line wore the same face.
The face of the first Jem’Hadar to fall.
Taran’atar’s face.
Nog continued firing. But they kept coming, surrounding him, every countenance overflowing with the brute savagery he’d always known lay just beneath Taran’atar’s veneer of civility.
The phaser in his hand suddenly stopped firing. Out of power. Great.
To Nog’s astonishment, the columns of Jem’Hadar abruptly halted their advance. Except for the cacophonous strains of distant music, utter silence engulfed the world.
A lone, black-clad Jem’Hadar soldier stepped forward, continuing his deliberate approach until he stood within arm’s reach. The creature towered forbiddingly over Nog, who felt his guts turn to parboiled gree worms. He concentrated on the barely audible music in an effort to master his fear. He wished fervently that Captain Sisko had agreed to sponsor his application to Starfleet Academy more than four years ago. If that had happened, then he’d know how to handle himself now.
Confused, overlapping memories assailed him. Sisko hadsponsored him. He’d made it into the Academy. He’d served in a cadet unit called Omega Squadron, under the grandson of a famous Starfleet commodore. By graduation he’d already visited and seen more strange places than he could count, from Cardassia Prime to Talos IV. Perhaps more than any other Ferengi that had ever lived.
Then Nog recognized the ethereal sounds that were drifting across the dismal landscape: He’d first heard them aboard the Sagan,just before the artifact had first appeared. Its entwining, random-numerical melodies reminded him of the physical unreality of this place and helped him to suppress his overpowering urge to flee. And its steady pulse reminded him that the clock was still ticking inevitably toward the interdimensional “untethering” that Sacagawea had described—and which he had already previewed aboard the Defianton more than one occasion.
Somehow, Nog managed to hold his ground. When he spoke, his voice shook. “All right, Taran’atar. Get on with it.”
Then, to Nog’s immense surprise, an unexpected equanimity descended upon him. Right after they’d discovered the artifact, Ezri had tried to tell him that he needed to clear the air between himself and Taran’atar. He wondered if that’s what he was about to do, consciously or not. Maybe it explained why the artifact had recreated AR-558’s killing ground.
Taran’atar took a step back, raised his bloodied kar’takin,and swung the blade into Nog’s left leg, just below the knee. Whether real or imaginary, the pain utterly convinced Nog. He collapsed to the dust, screaming.
As though disconnected from his own body, Nog watched as Taran’atar reached down and picked up the severed leg as though it were some hard-won battle trophy. The Jem’Hadar smiled enigmatically as he tucked the limb behind his back, along with his gore-spattered blade. Then he tossed a small metallic object into the dust beside Nog.
Nog saw that it was a Starfleet combadge. He picked it up. He felt light-headed, unable to speak, conscious of little besides his own blood, which was rapidly soaking the desiccated ground. With trembling fingers, he activated the little device’s homing beacon, uncertain as to whether it could reach the Defiant.Or if it was working, or if it was even real.
The world turned sideways, the way it had the time he’d unwisely tried to match Vic Fontaine’s drummer drink for drink. “I’ll be seeing you,” he thought he heard Taran’atar say in an incongruously clear tenor voice, “in all the old familiar places.”
And just before consciousness fled him, Nog realized that he could probably deal with that.
All at once, Dax became aware that something in its environment had changed. The blind and deaf creature was well acquainted with the curious tingling sensation of being disassembled and reconstituted by a transporter beam—even harrowing, rather rough beamings such as the one it had just experienced. But this current feeling of sudden change was subtly different.
Dax still enjoyed the same euphoric freedom of gentle, aqueous suspension it had been experiencing for the past day or so, ever since its abrupt removal from Ezri Tigan’s body. What was different and perplexing waswhere the symbiont now found itself floating. It made no sense, but there could be no denying the water’s distinctive salinity and mineral factors. Even the limited sensorium of a symbiont could never mistake this particular place for any other.