ultimat2
CHAPTER TWO
"Let them go."

"What!?" Qor was incredulous.

Q frowned. "I can't have you go botching up my plans, you know. Your reward will come soon enough." He crossed the shipboard office to a shelf filled with knickknacks, and fiddled with a few.

Yugin, the elder Ferengi, retorted, "What would you have us do, then?"

"Nothing. I'll call you when I need you." Q disappeared in a flash of light.

"No manners at all," Qor muttered. Yugin shot him a piercing glance, and the young Ferengi was silenced.

"Do as he said."

Qor quenched his protest before it could be born. "Yes, Yugin," he assented quietly and returned to the holding cell where the prisoners were kept.

Quark called the brochure option to the screen and entered the code for the secret communications program encoded in it, a delicate feat of programming he was proud of. Well, at least Rom was.

"My initial plan has failed. I'm sending the spies your way." Yugin's message came through immediately, surprising Quark, for Yugin seldom failed at any endeavor. He had contacted Quark about the strange appearance of the spies aboard his ship, since Quark was an old friend and a close-by backup if anything went sour. And even though these spies were only a couple of children and an elderly woman, they had managed to outdo the shrewd Ferengi. How? He asked Yugin the same question.

"It's the stupid Q!"

"The Q? Why would the Q be interested in them?" Quark was puzzled.

"I don't know! That's why I'm asking you to keep an eye on them while they're aboard Deep Space Nine. I want you to find out why they were on my ship. I'm sending you their holos so you'll know who to look for. Good luck."

The transmission faded.

From behind Quark came the sound of someone clearing their throat, utterly sarcastic, yet so cringingly serious that it could only be one person. Quark turned around to come face to face with Odo.

"Constable!" he exclaimed in mock innocence.

"Quark," returned Odo, not fooled.

"Just how long have you been standing there?" ventured Quark, suspicious.

"Long enough to know that you're up to something. And that your 'brochure option' is really a covert communications signal. I was going to ask you to remove it anyway, but now I have a better reason."

Quark, ready with a rebuttal, decided against it and let his hand, posed in the air, fall to the counter in defeat as the changeling left without a second's glance back. Odo had done it again.

"So you're saying we're inside your book?" Hannah paced, trying to cast off the shock at their situation, still convinced that everything, this small, dark, cubic room the Ferengi had left them in, the entire starship, the Ferengi themselves, was a dream.

"So to speak. I didn't actually write us into the book. The temporal anomaly we're trapped in is the same one I wrote about. And those two Ferengi are in my book. I got a look out of a window on the way to this cell. We're docked at Deep Space Nine, the space station where my book mainly takes place." Pushing a handful of red hair over her shoulder, Anja found that she sounded calm, even through her disbelief.

"Oh, my," intoned Frau, who, not herself a Trekker, but knowing an impossibility when she saw one, had been in a daze ever since their capture. She leaned back against a hard, gray wall, her gaze sweeping from side to side as if she expected answers to appear from thin air.

"So, how do we get out?" asked Hannah, her voice edged with nervousness.

"Well," Anja began, "We're too late to go back through the temporal fissure we got here by. I'd say our only chance now is to go through the wormhole."

"The wormhole?" repeated Hannah. "But the wormhole leads to the Gamma Quadrant, not home!"

"That's where this temporal anomaly comes in. In my book, the wormhole went through a flux that made it temporally unstable. It, basically, became a time portal."

Frau shook her head. "It sounds too complicated to me."

Hannah pressed the palms of her hands to her temples. "That's why 'Star Trek' is fiction, and none of this time frolicking can convince me otherwise."

Anja pursed her lips in defiance but remained silent.

Suddenly, the door to their cell slid open, and the second Ferengi stepped in. "Follow me," was all he said, leading the way into the corridor.

Determined to be in the lead, Anja marched down the corridor the Ferengi had left them in, feeling somehow responsible for their situation, yet excited. She wanted to find Captain Sisko, Major Kira, and the rest of the cast of DS9 and ask for their autographs, this urge a result of a lifetime of die-hard Trekkieness.

In the habitat ring after turning off a corridor leading from the docking port, Anja headed for the Promenade. She didn't know what she'd do once she got there, but it seemed the place to find out.

Behind her, Frau conversed with Hannah, who had taken on the job of explaining all the technicalities of "Star Trek" to Frau.

"And Quark and Odo don't get along," Hannah stated.

"Who are they?" Frau asked.

"Well, Quark is a Ferengi. They're the aliens with the big ears like we saw. Odo is a shapeshifter. He can change into just about anything. He hasn't perfected the human form, though, so he looks a little like he's made out of clay."

Frau frowned. "Okay."

Hannah continued. "This station is near a wormhole that leads to the Gamma Quadrant. We're in the Alpha Quadrant." She paused. "Anja, do you know about what year this is?"

"About 2375."

"Yes, about 2375 . . ."

Anja let Hannah's voice fade out as they neared the Promenade, where Starfleet officers and space travelers of all different races mingled among the many shops and eating establishments the station had to offer. It was impossible not to want to be a part of this new civilization; it had so much to offer. She worked her way through the crowd and soon found herself at Quark's, turning to find that Frau and Hannah had followed her.

"Why don't we sit down for a bit?" she suggested. Her companions agreed, and they chose a table at the center of the establishment.

Soon, a waiter arrived to take their order. The edge of Anja's lips curved upward in a smile as she remembered something Quark had said in the Deep Space Nine episode "The Way of the Warrior." "I'll take a root beer," she said. Not knowing what to do, Hannah and Frau ordered the same. The waiter left to get their drinks.

"Anja," Hannah said, "do you know what's going on? I mean, you said it was your book . . ." her voice trailed off.

"Let's just say it's like I'm in the middle of an episode I've seen a hundred times, but in the part of the station they don't show on TV." Anja searched for the words. "I know what's going to happen, but . . . It's a situation I used to imagine myself in, but I never thought would happen. To put it plainly, I'm just about as lost as you."

"As lost as me?" Frau wasn't fooled. She shook her head again, though she was beginning to accept the situation.

The waiter returned with their root beers. As Anja gazed at the bubbling brown liquid, she realized how thirsty she was. She lifted her glass to her mouth, savoring the feeling of the cool wetness sliding down her throat.

She set the glass on the table and looked at Frau and Hannah. "We need to come up with a plan," she said.

"A plan? For vhat?" Frau wondered again at all this.

Anja took a sip of root beer, then explained, "Tomorrow at 1700 hours all the alarms on the station will go off. Captain Sisko and Captain Picard will both notice . . ."

"Captain Picard is here, too?" Hannah asked.

"Yes. Anyway," Anja continued, "they will notice that the wormhole has dilated. They will want to know why, and eventually their curiosity will lead them to send the Defiant through the wormhole. I want to have gained Captain Sisko's favor before then. I want to be on that ship."

"Vhy? Aren't you happy here?" asked Frau.

Anja shook her head. "It isn't a matter of being happy. In my book, three people from our time were sent through the fissure. They were on the Defiant when it went through the wormhole. And they saved the lives of each and every crewmember. Well, I've been looking for them ever since we got here. According to my book, they should be here, now, at Quark's." Anja paused. "They're not. We have to go on the Defiant because we are those three people. We have to save the Defiant."