CHAPTER 7

"I MAY BE sick …"
The two time cops stared at Sisko with expressions so much alike that he wasn't sure which one was about to throw up on his desk. He held his breath for a moment, ready to dodge away in either direction.
"Tell me about it," Lucsly said then. "My palms are sweating."
Dulmur swallowed hard. "Think of the repercussions … a Klingon from the twenty-third century realizes that a Federation vessel from the future is potentially within his grasp …"
"We'd all be speaking Klingonese," the other one said.
"Can you imagine?" Dulmur looked at him. "All those consonants."
"Q'apla," Lucsly parried, then they both shuddered.
"I didn't let Dax go," Sisko told them soothingly. "Koloth never knew we were even there."
"We'll be the judge of that," Lucsly told him.
"What happened next?" Dulmur asked bluntly.
Beginning to get the idea that he was being interviewed by two guys with the sense of humor of customs officials, Sisko sighed. "It was one thing to convince Dax to stay out of history's way. The problem was, history had a funny habit of coming our way."

"Benjamin … look."
The corridor was quiet now, all hands at stations or at lunch, except for Ben Sisko and Jadzia Dax, who were still desperately pretending to be doing something while scanning for a single renegade old Klingon. They hadn't found Darvin yet, but they did find destiny strolling down upon them as Ben Sisko looked up into the face of legend.
Faces—two.
Down the empty corridor strode two officers, conversing casually and seeming eminently at home here in these crisp halls.
Sisko turned his back until he could see the two only in his periphery, and tried to look occupied.
But he was listening as the wall comm whistled and the two officers angled toward it.
"Bridge to Captain Kirk," came a voice with an accent.
The young officer in the patina-green shirt tapped the wall comm. "Kirk here."
His voice was … well, commanding. It gave Sisko a shiver of proximity. He was within steps of the real thing, one of the first men to expand the Federation's influence in the settled galaxy. James Kirk was one of the early propellants pushing the envelope of civilization. He had a reputation for impulse and sideswiping, something Sisko understood from these past years as commander of an outpost on the deep frontier. History both cherished and disdained James Kirk—cherished for his unflagging energy and sense of right and wrong, disdained for his propensity to meddle and his rattlesnake tenacity at taking things into his own hands. He was a man who would load his dice if he could, and it took special taste to appreciate that.
But historians were documenters and analysts, not captains. Sisko always considered such caveats, and read between the lines.
Beside Kirk was the other half of the legend—Commander Spock. Still alive somewhere in Sisko's time, this Vulcan had been the first of his kind to break the cultural barriers and join Starfleet. It had cost him his relationship with his father for a couple of decades, but he stuck to his commitment as an officer.
The voice from the bridge said, "Mr. Barris is waiting on Channel A to speak to you, sir."
Kirk's posture tightened. "Pipe it down here, Mr. Chekov."
"Aye, sir. Mr. Barris is coming on."
"Keep working," Sisko murmured to Dax. "We're just a regular maintenance crew doing our job …"
"Yes, Mr. Barris, what can I do for you?"
"Kirk! This station is swarming with Klingons!"
Kirk fixed his eyes on his Vulcan first officer and patronized his way through the comm unit. "I was not aware, Mr. Barris, that twelve Klingons constitutes a swarm."
"Captain Kirk, there are Klingon soldiers on this station. Now, I want you to keep that grain safe!"
Sisko stiffened, anticipating.
Dax giggled, then tried to suppress it.
Sisko growled, "Dax …"
"I had no idea," she murmured.
"What?"
"He's so much more handsome in person … and those eyes …"
Continuing to pretend work, Sisko dismissed, "Kirk had quite the reputation as a ladies' man."
"Not him," Dax corrected, eyeing the pair. "Spock."
Sisko glanced at the Vulcan and couldn't deny Dax's assessment. Commander Spock possessed a passive elegance ideal to his position as second in command and foil to Captain Kirk. The two were as opposite as two men could be, physically but also in manner. As such they seemed an almost perfect set.
Kirk folded his arms. "Mr. Barris," he went on, "I have guards around the grain, I have guards around the Klingons … those guards are there because Starfleet wants them there. As for what you want—"
Sisko braced himself for a show, but Kirk glanced at Spock, and the restraint of his first officer seemed to scold him down.
"It has been noted and logged," the captain concluded with an edge.
Enthralled, Dax was looking too much.
Clapping the panel shut, Sisko straightened. "Let's go."
"Now?" she protested.
"Now."
He urged her around the corner, out of line of sight, then paused and listened as Spock's low voice traveled around to them.
"Captain, may I ask where you'll be?"
"Sickbay. With a … headache."
As the captain rounded the corner and headed away, Dax took one last peek. "I can't believe you don't want to at least meet Kirk!" she said.
"That's the last thing on my mind," Sisko said flatly.
She leaned toward him. "Come on, Benjamin. Are you telling me that you're not the tiniest bit interested in meeting one of the most famous men in Starfleet history?"
"We have a job to do."
"But that's James Kirk," she insisted right past his stern expression.
"Look," he protested, "of course I'd like to meet him. I'd like to shake his hand and ask him about … fighting the Gorn on Cestus Three. But that's not why we're here, old man."
"You're right," Dax said as he drew her along. "I guess the difference between you and me is that I remember this time. I lived in this time." She glanced back the way they'd come. "It's hard not to want to be part of it again."

Kirk paced into sickbay, all his tensions wired back up just from hearing Nils Barris's voice.
"Hi, Jim," McCoy said casually, putting a restraining beaker on top of a whole clutch of tribbles.
"Bones," Kirk returned. "What've you got for a headache?"
McCoy looked up at him in a kind of delight. "Let me guess. The Klingons. Barris!"
"Both." Kirk looked down at the tribbles in the big beaker. "How many of these did Uhura give you?"
"Just one."
"But you've got … uh, eleven."
"Noticed that, uh? Here. This ought to take care of it." The doctor handed him a couple of pills.
Accepting the pills, Kirk started adding up the minutes since he'd seen Uhura and her tribbles in the rec room. These looked almost full grown.
He pointed at them. "How do they … how do they …"
McCoy held out a defensive hand. "I haven't figured that out yet. But I can tell you this much—almost fifty percent of the creature's metabolism is geared toward reproduction." The doctor leaned on the table and peered at Kirk. "Do you know what you get if you feed a tribble too much?"
Simmering, Kirk peered back. "A fat tribble."
Annoyed that he was going to have to say it outright, McCoy told him, "No, you get a whole bunch of hungry little tribbles."
"Well, Bones, all I can suggest," Kirk told him, heading toward the door, "is that you open up a maternity ward."
Leonard McCoy watched the captain leave and regretted not being able to come up with a snide remark. He knew there was some problem with these tribbles, but damned if he couldn't find it. They were soft, they made a pretty noise, they were nice, they were passive, they liked being held close, and they made more little puff balls to love and purr. Quickly. Something about this didn't add up.
Still, the sickbay sounded kind of pleasant with eleven tribbles cooing in it.
The door panel slid open again and for a moment he thought the captain might be coming back, but when he looked up, he saw a young science officer whom he didn't know. The young man was of slender build and dark features.
"Oh—I'm so sorry," the young man said when he saw McCoy. Educated in England. "I thought everyone was at lunch, sir."
"We always keep at least one person on watch in all departments," McCoy said. How come this man didn't know that? "Do I know you?"
"Um … no, sir, I don't believe so. I just came aboard. I'm only visiting. I should've reported to you, but with all the alerts—"
"Visiting? From the station? You're a Starfleet officer. I didn't know there were any of us on the station."
"Uh … no, there aren't, sir. I just came on board recently, for transport to my new assignment."
Pretty vague, but McCoy didn't care about the details. "You a doctor? Or are you sick?"
"Pardon me," the young man said, extending his hand to McCoy. "Dr. Julian Bashir, sir. I'm doing a study on systems-wide medical sensor functions and I thought I'd have a look about the sickbay."
"What's that study for?"
"Oh, someone at Starfleet wants to enhance the capability of tracking individuals by biotechnics. It's for use on stations like K-Seven and for … oh, for instance, tracking down disguised spies on ships."
McCoy harrumphed at the idea. "Sounds like something Starfleet Medical would come up with to keep people busy."
"Very likely," Bashir said with a tolerant and perhaps nervous smile. "About the ship-wide sensors … do you think they could pick up an individual by biotechniques? Say a Vulcan or a … oh, a Klingon?"
"Well, we'd have to do a deck-by-deck scan," McCoy told him. "Klingons aren't that hard to detect. They hate to shave, for one. They don't like our food, for another."
"Doctor," Bashir said with a tuck of his chin, "are you teasing me?"
"A little. It's just a muscle reaction from not having a Vulcan around. Why don't you have some coffee and set yourself up at that terminal over there. The computer'll assist you with your sensor research. I'll clear it with the bridge."
The other doctor, luckily, was engrossed in his study of the little clutch of furballs when Bashir's communicator let out one plaintive bleep—and he turned quickly to see whether or not McCoy had noticed, but no. The bleep blended in with the trill and purr of those little animals.
Bashir turned and headed back for the door. "I forgot something. Back soon, sir."
McCoy didn't even look up. "Mmm-hmm."
The corridor was bright and bustling, but no one noticed him as he headed around a corner, trying to find a place where he could use the communicator without anyone listening. Suddenly a hand reached out and yanked him into an alcove. It was O'Brien, holding his own communicator.
"The next bandshift in the Enterprise scan cycle will be in three minutes," Major Kira's voice flickered over the old-style device.
"We'll be ready, Major. O'Brien out."
Bashir got the idea quickly enough—they'd been ordered out of here for now. They'd be beaming out. That meant privacy. "We'd better get to a turbolift."
Together they turned and headed for the nearest lift, then had to wait as the lift came to their deck. When it did, the doors slid open and they boarded, but couldn't beam out.
Standing in the lift, a young woman looked at them both, and Bashir remembered her—he'd seen her before. He'd even spoken to her, though he didn't recall specifically when. She hadn't made much of an impression, and he was dismayed to find he'd made one on her.
"Hello, again," the young lieutenant said.
"Hello," Bashir responded automatically.
O'Brien took the lift's control. "Deck Ten."
The woman looked down at Bashir's waist. "Your flap's open."
He blinked. "Excuse me?"
"On your tricorder. You're draining power."
He looked down at the tricorder—he'd forgotten he was still carrying it. Sure enough, the front flap was hanging open. He snapped it closed. "Oh—thank you."
"He's always doing that," O'Brien teased.
She smiled at him. "I'm coming in to the sickbay tomorrow for my physical … fifteen hundred. Lieutenant Watley."
The lift doors opened and she started out, but then she turned in the doorway so the door panels wouldn't close and smiled again, this time infectiously.
Bashir smiled back. Maybe he could arrange to be in sickbay about fifteen hundred tomorrow. Maybe.
She sidled away with a last glance, and O'Brien said, "You realize, of course, she was only using you to get to me."
The lift doors closed. O'Brien activated it, made it go between decks, then stopped it.
"Watley," Bashir said, his chest suddenly constricting. "That was my great-grandmother's name!"
"Funny," the engineer drawled as he pulled out his communicator again.
"I think she was in Starfleet!"
O'Brien scolded him with a glower about not knowing his family history any better than that, then said, "It's a common name."
"But what if that was her!" Bashir's mind raced.
"Do you realize the odds?" The engineer quickly fingered the controls of the communicator.
Bashir waved a panicked hand. "No one ever met my great-grandfather—this could be a predestinational paradox!" As O'Brien shook his head, the doctor insisted, "Didn't you take elementary temporal mechanics at the Academy? I may be destined to fall in love with that woman and … and become my own great-grandfather!"
O'Brien stared. "You're being ridiculous."
"Ridiculous? If I don't meet with her tomorrow, I may never be born!"
Kira's voice trickled through the communicator in the nick of time. "Chief, are you ready for transport?"
"Are we ever," O'Brien said.
"Stand by."
"You saw the way she looked at me?" Bashir obsessed, frantically imagining all the repercussions of his life, the people he'd saved who would now die, the tests he'd conducted that would go unsolved, and by the time the thought spread itself to its full potential, the entire universe was collapsing upon itself because he'd never been born. He caught O'Brien's look again and added, "You can't just dismiss this!"
"I can try."
"Fine!" Bashir insisted as the tingling rush of the transporter effect shivered all his skin hairs. "But I can't wait to see your face when you get back to DS9 and find out I never existed!"

 

CHAPTER 7

"I MAY BE sick …"
The two time cops stared at Sisko with expressions so much alike that he wasn't sure which one was about to throw up on his desk. He held his breath for a moment, ready to dodge away in either direction.
"Tell me about it," Lucsly said then. "My palms are sweating."
Dulmur swallowed hard. "Think of the repercussions … a Klingon from the twenty-third century realizes that a Federation vessel from the future is potentially within his grasp …"
"We'd all be speaking Klingonese," the other one said.
"Can you imagine?" Dulmur looked at him. "All those consonants."
"Q'apla," Lucsly parried, then they both shuddered.
"I didn't let Dax go," Sisko told them soothingly. "Koloth never knew we were even there."
"We'll be the judge of that," Lucsly told him.
"What happened next?" Dulmur asked bluntly.
Beginning to get the idea that he was being interviewed by two guys with the sense of humor of customs officials, Sisko sighed. "It was one thing to convince Dax to stay out of history's way. The problem was, history had a funny habit of coming our way."

"Benjamin … look."
The corridor was quiet now, all hands at stations or at lunch, except for Ben Sisko and Jadzia Dax, who were still desperately pretending to be doing something while scanning for a single renegade old Klingon. They hadn't found Darvin yet, but they did find destiny strolling down upon them as Ben Sisko looked up into the face of legend.
Faces—two.
Down the empty corridor strode two officers, conversing casually and seeming eminently at home here in these crisp halls.
Sisko turned his back until he could see the two only in his periphery, and tried to look occupied.
But he was listening as the wall comm whistled and the two officers angled toward it.
"Bridge to Captain Kirk," came a voice with an accent.
The young officer in the patina-green shirt tapped the wall comm. "Kirk here."
His voice was … well, commanding. It gave Sisko a shiver of proximity. He was within steps of the real thing, one of the first men to expand the Federation's influence in the settled galaxy. James Kirk was one of the early propellants pushing the envelope of civilization. He had a reputation for impulse and sideswiping, something Sisko understood from these past years as commander of an outpost on the deep frontier. History both cherished and disdained James Kirk—cherished for his unflagging energy and sense of right and wrong, disdained for his propensity to meddle and his rattlesnake tenacity at taking things into his own hands. He was a man who would load his dice if he could, and it took special taste to appreciate that.
But historians were documenters and analysts, not captains. Sisko always considered such caveats, and read between the lines.
Beside Kirk was the other half of the legend—Commander Spock. Still alive somewhere in Sisko's time, this Vulcan had been the first of his kind to break the cultural barriers and join Starfleet. It had cost him his relationship with his father for a couple of decades, but he stuck to his commitment as an officer.
The voice from the bridge said, "Mr. Barris is waiting on Channel A to speak to you, sir."
Kirk's posture tightened. "Pipe it down here, Mr. Chekov."
"Aye, sir. Mr. Barris is coming on."
"Keep working," Sisko murmured to Dax. "We're just a regular maintenance crew doing our job …"
"Yes, Mr. Barris, what can I do for you?"
"Kirk! This station is swarming with Klingons!"
Kirk fixed his eyes on his Vulcan first officer and patronized his way through the comm unit. "I was not aware, Mr. Barris, that twelve Klingons constitutes a swarm."
"Captain Kirk, there are Klingon soldiers on this station. Now, I want you to keep that grain safe!"
Sisko stiffened, anticipating.
Dax giggled, then tried to suppress it.
Sisko growled, "Dax …"
"I had no idea," she murmured.
"What?"
"He's so much more handsome in person … and those eyes …"
Continuing to pretend work, Sisko dismissed, "Kirk had quite the reputation as a ladies' man."
"Not him," Dax corrected, eyeing the pair. "Spock."
Sisko glanced at the Vulcan and couldn't deny Dax's assessment. Commander Spock possessed a passive elegance ideal to his position as second in command and foil to Captain Kirk. The two were as opposite as two men could be, physically but also in manner. As such they seemed an almost perfect set.
Kirk folded his arms. "Mr. Barris," he went on, "I have guards around the grain, I have guards around the Klingons … those guards are there because Starfleet wants them there. As for what you want—"
Sisko braced himself for a show, but Kirk glanced at Spock, and the restraint of his first officer seemed to scold him down.
"It has been noted and logged," the captain concluded with an edge.
Enthralled, Dax was looking too much.
Clapping the panel shut, Sisko straightened. "Let's go."
"Now?" she protested.
"Now."
He urged her around the corner, out of line of sight, then paused and listened as Spock's low voice traveled around to them.
"Captain, may I ask where you'll be?"
"Sickbay. With a … headache."
As the captain rounded the corner and headed away, Dax took one last peek. "I can't believe you don't want to at least meet Kirk!" she said.
"That's the last thing on my mind," Sisko said flatly.
She leaned toward him. "Come on, Benjamin. Are you telling me that you're not the tiniest bit interested in meeting one of the most famous men in Starfleet history?"
"We have a job to do."
"But that's James Kirk," she insisted right past his stern expression.
"Look," he protested, "of course I'd like to meet him. I'd like to shake his hand and ask him about … fighting the Gorn on Cestus Three. But that's not why we're here, old man."
"You're right," Dax said as he drew her along. "I guess the difference between you and me is that I remember this time. I lived in this time." She glanced back the way they'd come. "It's hard not to want to be part of it again."

Kirk paced into sickbay, all his tensions wired back up just from hearing Nils Barris's voice.
"Hi, Jim," McCoy said casually, putting a restraining beaker on top of a whole clutch of tribbles.
"Bones," Kirk returned. "What've you got for a headache?"
McCoy looked up at him in a kind of delight. "Let me guess. The Klingons. Barris!"
"Both." Kirk looked down at the tribbles in the big beaker. "How many of these did Uhura give you?"
"Just one."
"But you've got … uh, eleven."
"Noticed that, uh? Here. This ought to take care of it." The doctor handed him a couple of pills.
Accepting the pills, Kirk started adding up the minutes since he'd seen Uhura and her tribbles in the rec room. These looked almost full grown.
He pointed at them. "How do they … how do they …"
McCoy held out a defensive hand. "I haven't figured that out yet. But I can tell you this much—almost fifty percent of the creature's metabolism is geared toward reproduction." The doctor leaned on the table and peered at Kirk. "Do you know what you get if you feed a tribble too much?"
Simmering, Kirk peered back. "A fat tribble."
Annoyed that he was going to have to say it outright, McCoy told him, "No, you get a whole bunch of hungry little tribbles."
"Well, Bones, all I can suggest," Kirk told him, heading toward the door, "is that you open up a maternity ward."
Leonard McCoy watched the captain leave and regretted not being able to come up with a snide remark. He knew there was some problem with these tribbles, but damned if he couldn't find it. They were soft, they made a pretty noise, they were nice, they were passive, they liked being held close, and they made more little puff balls to love and purr. Quickly. Something about this didn't add up.
Still, the sickbay sounded kind of pleasant with eleven tribbles cooing in it.
The door panel slid open again and for a moment he thought the captain might be coming back, but when he looked up, he saw a young science officer whom he didn't know. The young man was of slender build and dark features.
"Oh—I'm so sorry," the young man said when he saw McCoy. Educated in England. "I thought everyone was at lunch, sir."
"We always keep at least one person on watch in all departments," McCoy said. How come this man didn't know that? "Do I know you?"
"Um … no, sir, I don't believe so. I just came aboard. I'm only visiting. I should've reported to you, but with all the alerts—"
"Visiting? From the station? You're a Starfleet officer. I didn't know there were any of us on the station."
"Uh … no, there aren't, sir. I just came on board recently, for transport to my new assignment."
Pretty vague, but McCoy didn't care about the details. "You a doctor? Or are you sick?"
"Pardon me," the young man said, extending his hand to McCoy. "Dr. Julian Bashir, sir. I'm doing a study on systems-wide medical sensor functions and I thought I'd have a look about the sickbay."
"What's that study for?"
"Oh, someone at Starfleet wants to enhance the capability of tracking individuals by biotechnics. It's for use on stations like K-Seven and for … oh, for instance, tracking down disguised spies on ships."
McCoy harrumphed at the idea. "Sounds like something Starfleet Medical would come up with to keep people busy."
"Very likely," Bashir said with a tolerant and perhaps nervous smile. "About the ship-wide sensors … do you think they could pick up an individual by biotechniques? Say a Vulcan or a … oh, a Klingon?"
"Well, we'd have to do a deck-by-deck scan," McCoy told him. "Klingons aren't that hard to detect. They hate to shave, for one. They don't like our food, for another."
"Doctor," Bashir said with a tuck of his chin, "are you teasing me?"
"A little. It's just a muscle reaction from not having a Vulcan around. Why don't you have some coffee and set yourself up at that terminal over there. The computer'll assist you with your sensor research. I'll clear it with the bridge."
The other doctor, luckily, was engrossed in his study of the little clutch of furballs when Bashir's communicator let out one plaintive bleep—and he turned quickly to see whether or not McCoy had noticed, but no. The bleep blended in with the trill and purr of those little animals.
Bashir turned and headed back for the door. "I forgot something. Back soon, sir."
McCoy didn't even look up. "Mmm-hmm."
The corridor was bright and bustling, but no one noticed him as he headed around a corner, trying to find a place where he could use the communicator without anyone listening. Suddenly a hand reached out and yanked him into an alcove. It was O'Brien, holding his own communicator.
"The next bandshift in the Enterprise scan cycle will be in three minutes," Major Kira's voice flickered over the old-style device.
"We'll be ready, Major. O'Brien out."
Bashir got the idea quickly enough—they'd been ordered out of here for now. They'd be beaming out. That meant privacy. "We'd better get to a turbolift."
Together they turned and headed for the nearest lift, then had to wait as the lift came to their deck. When it did, the doors slid open and they boarded, but couldn't beam out.
Standing in the lift, a young woman looked at them both, and Bashir remembered her—he'd seen her before. He'd even spoken to her, though he didn't recall specifically when. She hadn't made much of an impression, and he was dismayed to find he'd made one on her.
"Hello, again," the young lieutenant said.
"Hello," Bashir responded automatically.
O'Brien took the lift's control. "Deck Ten."
The woman looked down at Bashir's waist. "Your flap's open."
He blinked. "Excuse me?"
"On your tricorder. You're draining power."
He looked down at the tricorder—he'd forgotten he was still carrying it. Sure enough, the front flap was hanging open. He snapped it closed. "Oh—thank you."
"He's always doing that," O'Brien teased.
She smiled at him. "I'm coming in to the sickbay tomorrow for my physical … fifteen hundred. Lieutenant Watley."
The lift doors opened and she started out, but then she turned in the doorway so the door panels wouldn't close and smiled again, this time infectiously.
Bashir smiled back. Maybe he could arrange to be in sickbay about fifteen hundred tomorrow. Maybe.
She sidled away with a last glance, and O'Brien said, "You realize, of course, she was only using you to get to me."
The lift doors closed. O'Brien activated it, made it go between decks, then stopped it.
"Watley," Bashir said, his chest suddenly constricting. "That was my great-grandmother's name!"
"Funny," the engineer drawled as he pulled out his communicator again.
"I think she was in Starfleet!"
O'Brien scolded him with a glower about not knowing his family history any better than that, then said, "It's a common name."
"But what if that was her!" Bashir's mind raced.
"Do you realize the odds?" The engineer quickly fingered the controls of the communicator.
Bashir waved a panicked hand. "No one ever met my great-grandfather—this could be a predestinational paradox!" As O'Brien shook his head, the doctor insisted, "Didn't you take elementary temporal mechanics at the Academy? I may be destined to fall in love with that woman and … and become my own great-grandfather!"
O'Brien stared. "You're being ridiculous."
"Ridiculous? If I don't meet with her tomorrow, I may never be born!"
Kira's voice trickled through the communicator in the nick of time. "Chief, are you ready for transport?"
"Are we ever," O'Brien said.
"Stand by."
"You saw the way she looked at me?" Bashir obsessed, frantically imagining all the repercussions of his life, the people he'd saved who would now die, the tests he'd conducted that would go unsolved, and by the time the thought spread itself to its full potential, the entire universe was collapsing upon itself because he'd never been born. He caught O'Brien's look again and added, "You can't just dismiss this!"
"I can try."
"Fine!" Bashir insisted as the tingling rush of the transporter effect shivered all his skin hairs. "But I can't wait to see your face when you get back to DS9 and find out I never existed!"