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course, Captain," he said, leaning forward over his mug of blood wine. "We were monitoring your little rescue mission from the moment you left your station. When your ship disappeared, your mission became more than one of curiosity. Suddenly it became a threat to the Empire."
    Sisko nodded, hoping Sotugh would continue.
    Sotugh sat back, obviously and surprisingly not going to say another word.
    Sisko studied him over the bottle of Jibetian ale. Sotugh was not going to make the telling of this story easy in any fashion.
    "Your ship disappeared?" the catlike woman asked, glancing first at Sisko, then back at Sotugh.
    "So, Captain," Cap said. "Don't hold us in suspense. What happened next?"
    Sisko smiled, settled into a more comfortable position, and told them.

Four
    I STOOD. I did not like this new ship, this position, or these new impossible stars and systems.
    "Dax," I said, "where are we?"
    "According to my sensors, we haven't moved, Captain."
    "We are at the same coordinates," Worf said, confirming what Dax had said.
    "The distress call is gone," Nog said.
    Something was very, very wrong. We had been lured here. My feeling had been right. Here there were dragons; there was one before us, and I was not pleased.
    I returned to my chair. "I want to know who that ship belongs to and what it wants with us," I said. I sat forward and studied it.
    The ship was beautiful in a way that even now I cannot describe. Its design looked aerodynamic, as if the ship would function well in atmo-sphere, under water, or in space. Upon closer observation, the two wings, which had seemed attached to each other a moment before, had a small bulge between them, as unnoticeable as the body of a monarch butterfly or a Carnuiin round beetle. Both wings tapered back to fine points. No ports or weapons marred the perfect gleaming black surfaces.
    "I'm not finding this ship anywhere in our database," Dax said. "The computer can't match it, and I've never seen anything like it."
    That was quite a statement. In her many lives, Dax had seen a multitude of ships.
    "I believe their shields are up," Worf said. "These readings are clear, but I do not trust them. They do not seem to be powering their weapons, but that does not mean they are not doing so."
    "Let me know the moment the situation changes, Mr. Worf."
    "Aye, sir."
    I frowned at the ship. I blamed it for our transfer to this new place, even though I did not yet know exactly what, or where, this new place was. At that point, I was wondering how we had moved from one area of space to another without our instruments reflecting it.
    "Captain," Chief O'Brien said. "That empty area of space I mentioned. It's no longer empty."
    "I noticed, Chief."
    "I mean, everything's back. The space dust. The debris. Everything that should be in an area of space."
    "And five star systems," Dax added. "All inhabited."
    "Most likely by the people who built that ship in front of us," I said.
    "Those systems are stable," O'Brien said. "They weren't just moved there. It's as if they've always been right there. But they are on no modern star charts, and they weren't there a minute ago."
    I was becoming more and more convinced that space hadn't changed, but that we had. "I want a double check of our equipment. I want to know if our coordinates have changed."
    "My readings show they haven't," Dax said.
    "I don't care about your readings," I said. "It seems to me that our systems might have been affected by that strange rupture we experienced. I want to know if we have found a wormhole, perhaps, or something else, something that moved us from one area of space to another."
    "Nothing in our systems show that, Captain," Worf said. "I have already performed the necessary checks. If we have shifted positions, then our readings do not and will not show it."
    "What about time?" I asked. If we remained in the same area of space, perhaps we had moved either forward or backward in time. That, too, had happened before, and it was