But only one of them remained afterward.
McHogue dropped his fist and let the fingers slowly uncurl. "There—"
Dazed, she looked down at her own empty hands.
"That's what he wanted." McHogue nodded in grim satisfaction. "Let's see how he likes it."
He walked in a place where he had walked before.
One footstep came after another, unconscious and automatic; he could have been asleep, if his eyes had not followed the angle of the corridor, the metal grids and doorways indicating—to the watching part of his mind—where he was.
This is the station. Sisko's thoughts moved slowly inside bis head, one word matching each pace. I'm back . . . back aboard Deep Space Nine.
He must have been asleep, and dreaming; that was the only explanation that appeared in the silent chambers of his skull. He had been someplace else, he knew—but where? Dax had been there as well . . . but not Dax; not all of her. Just the part of her named Jadzia. His old friend Dax had been . . . in a whole other world. How could that be?
And there had been another face, just for a moment, a vision that had appeared and then had been gone before he could catch it. And words that were just about to be spoken . . . He shook his head, knowing that those were lost as well.
That was the problem with dreams, mused Sisko as he walked along the endless station corridor. Dreams showed you things, but didn't explain them. Very much like the vision of Kai Opaka that he'd had, so long ago. Prophecies and blessings; he smiled to himself, remembering. Things that the Kai had warned him about; things that would happen and for which he would have to be ready. The unreal becoming the real . . .
McHogue.
The single name was enough. For him to wake from the last remnants of his dreaming. He stopped his walking, turning to look about himself. Now he could remember where he had been.
The last thing Sisko could recall, from his standing in the middle of the ruins of Moagitty, had been McHogue's glaring hatred and the fist aimed at his own chest. Jadzia had tried to pull him away; he remembered her tug at his arm. And then . . . nothing.
Until he had found himself here, back aboard DS9.
Or not DS9; that was a possibility he had to consider. He had stepped again into McHogue's world, not by walking into an altered holosuite this time, but by making the arduous journey through the spatial disturbances to Bajor. The result was the same; any dealings with McHogue wound up being on McHogue's terms. McHogue got to choose the playing field; in baseball terms, Sisko thought grimly, he had a permanent home advantage.
There had been a time, the meeting when General Aur and his new Minister of Trade had come to the station, when McHogue had made the assertion that an infinite regress, artificial realities nested within a spiral of hallucinations, was impossible, both in theory and practice. Even now, he had no reason to doubt the claim. McHogue was too much of an egotist to create more than one world to be in at a time; the CI technology's self-appointed deity would be unlikely to divide himself up.
Sisko started walking again. If he could reach the Ops deck, perhaps he would be able to determine the exact nature of the world into which he'd been thrust. There might be people there, the other crew members; anyone with a voice and face that wasn't McHogue's. He hastened his steps, heading from the empty sector to the regions where there would be life and sound. . . .
He came to the Promenade.
But silence greeted him. Even there, at the station's heart, where greed and appetite and the manifold lusts of sentient creatures had tumbled together in their own perpetual, noisy storm . . .
He felt the silence before he saw the rest, the other indices of death. Strewn across the Promenade's open walkways were blackened shapes that had once been living creatures, the human and nonhuman population of DS9, connected now to each other like a string of black hieroglyphs, sentences whose meanings were beyond the scope of mortal reading. Charred figures lay facedown and anonymous in the doorways of what had been the Promenade's business establishments; in Quark's bar, the tables and stools had been knocked aside by whatever fiery hand had left the last patrons curled around their own ashes.
Sisko stood at the edge of the grim display, his senses at war with a mind that refused to believe its perceptions.
This is what Jadzia saw. His thoughts struggled to connect the pieces spread out before him. What she saw down there, in the city of Moagitty. The unleashing of death itself, the face of pure murder—the only difference being, he knew, between whitening skeletal remains and these things of crumbling cinder. What he and the other officers of the station had termed an epidemic of murder had been transformed, apothesized, into its own incendiary hurricane, an annihilating firestorm. All to feed McHogue's vaulting ambitions, his embrace of godhood; no doubt he would be ready to boast that he had given these victims immortality as well, incorporated them into the fabric of the world that had burst into existence from the limits of his skull.
"Is there anyone here?" Sisko called aloud, his voice echoing in the high-ceilinged space. "Anyone left alive?" He could hear in his voice the absence of hope, the playing out of his role as the station's commander. A charade, he knew, a performance without an audience, unwatched except by embers inside the blackened eye sockets on all sides of him as he moved forward. He walked carefully, finding an empty space for each footstep.
Outside the entrance to the security office—the doors had pulled away from their surrounding girders, the heat that had passed across them sufficient to warp metal—unexpected motion snagged at the corner of his sight. Sisko turned, his hand reaching to touch a section of bare wall.
The shimmering movement rippled away from his fingertips, as though a stone had somehow been dropped into vertical water. The firestorm that had swept through the Promenade had left the expanse before him smooth as molten glass. A dead thing, as dead as all the rest of the station's structure and those who had occupied it . . .
But alive as well. In some sense beyond Sisko's understanding; he could feel a minute vibration, less than breathing, against his skin.
"Who's there?" he asked, though he already knew.
I remain . . .
A voice, a whisper that brushed against his ear. But one that he recognized.
"Odo?" He turned to look over his shoulder, as though he might find the shapeshifter's human form standing close to him.
Where I have always been. Where I will always be. . . .
The wall rippled again, and became a mirror, one in which he could see his own face reflected; the depths of apparent space might have been made of obsidian, rendered dark as the ashes that surrounded him.
There was another face in the mirrored surface, that Sisko could just discern. Eyes closed, it might have been asleep and dreaming, encased inside a becalmed sea. The slow currents of its words parted the somnolent mouth.
Where I should be . . . where I wanted to be . . .
The voice was drained of all emotion, as though it emerged from narcotized sleep. That was how Sisko knew the face he saw in the glass-smoothed wall was not the real Odo—not the Odo of reality, that place outside McHogue's dark universe—but his echo. From that time when the security chief, taunted by Gul Dukat's hints of secrets to be revealed, had gone into the altered holosuite and found . . . what? Odo had refused to tell anyone; had said, in fact, that he had found nothing in there.