Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three Read online

  “Well,” he said, and he turned, starting for the doors. He would return to the security office and—

  “Odo,” Kira said, her tone plaintive. He turned back to her. “Odo,” she said again, and they at last looked at each other, really looked at each other. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”

  “I agree,” he said, and though they had yet to have that conversation, he felt immediate relief that the necessity for it had finally been voiced.

  “So let’s talk,” Kira said.

  “Now?” Odo questioned, surprised at the suggestion.

  “Don’t you think we’ve put it off long enough?” she asked.

  They had, of course, Odo agreed, but he had no desire to talk on such a personal level in so public a setting. He knew Kira, though, and understood that she also would not want to have a private discussion amid so many people. Trusting her, he motioned to his deputies, waving them forward. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said, and the two men wasted no time in moving into the party.

  Kira looked around the room. “Let’s, um, find someplace a little quieter,” she said, placing a hand around Odo’s upper arm. She pulled him deeper into the room, and over to the door that connected the living area of Dax’s quarters with her bedroom. The panel slid open before them, and Kira pulled him inside. She let go of his arm, walked farther into the room, and turned to face him. The door closed behind Odo, and the sounds of the party, though still audible, diminished considerably. “There,” Kira said. “That’s better.”

  “I’m not sure where to start,” Odo said haltingly. He had spent long hours and days imagining this conversation, searching for the words that would bring about his rapprochement with Kira, but he had yet to find anything satisfactory.

  “I think we need to start where all of this began,” Kira said. “With you and the female changeling.”

  The gender-specific description of the Founder leader had always seemed strange to Odo, though he used it himself. Even though he had joined with her several times now, and with the Great Link itself, he still had no deeper understanding of their physiology than what he had learned from Dr. Bashir; he did not even know how they reproduced, or if analogues of male and female truly applied in any meaningful way to changelings. But they had to refer to her in some manner, and when Odo had asked her name, she had claimed not to have one.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. He could have expected Kira to open their discussion by addressing the heart of the matter. He had always appreciated her directness.

  “How could you have allowed her to keep you from fulfilling your promise to our resistance cell?” she asked.

  Odo listened to the question, noting that Kira had already shifted some of the responsibility for his betrayal from him to the Founder leader. Although it would be hard, he knew that he would have admit to her that he alone had been to blame for his actions. “I don’t want—” he began, but stopped as he noted the cessation of the drums in the other room. “I don’t want to make—” he said, but then stopped again. “Did you hear that?” he asked Kira. “It sounded like a woman threatening to cut off somebody’s head.”

  Kira crossed the room back over to Odo. “Probably just somebody responding to one of Quark’s ridiculous advances,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure your deputies can handle it.” She took Odo by the arm once more, leading him over to another set of doors. They opened, and Kira walked into Dax’s ’fresher. She reached into the closet section of the small area and dragged a storage bin from it, then sat down on the short stool that stood in front of the vanity. She gestured toward the container, clearly inviting Odo to sit down opposite her.

  “Do you think the lieutenant will take exception to our being here?” he asked. “I mean, this is…personal.”

  “Jadzia’s not exactly a private person,” Kira said. “I don’t think she’d even mind if we tried on her clothing.” She paused, and then added, “Well, I don’t think she’d mind if I did.” Odo looked at her, and knew from the expression on her face that she was picturing him in one of Dax’s fashionable dresses. Suddenly, Kira burst into laughter. Odo watched her for a moment, and then couldn’t contain his own throaty expulsion of breath; the unexpected release felt good, in particular because he shared it with Kira.

  As the welcome moment continued, he moved into the small room with her and dropped down onto the bin. As their laughter subsided, Kira leaned forward and worked a control pad beside the doors, and they glided closed, completely cutting off the sounds from the living area. Odo opted to utilize the moment to pick up the conversation they had only just started. “Nerys,” he said, “it wasn’t the female Founder’s fault that I didn’t run the security diagnostic when I said I would.” Their plan had been for Odo to execute the procedure at a specified time, disabling various alarms so that Rom would be able to carry out his sabotage. But Odo hadn’t done that.

  “I’m glad you accept responsibility for your actions,” Kira said seriously, leaning forward, resting her elbows on her knees, the smile that had accompanied her chortles now gone from her face. She looked down at the floor, seeming to struggle to find what she wanted to say. At last, she lifted her gaze. “I don’t understand how you could abandon your friends like that.”

  “It had nothing to do with my friends,” Odo tried to explain. “It had only to do with me. I had an opportunity to learn about my people, to learn about the Great Link itself.”

  Kira’s features hardened, and she sat back up, pulling away from Odo. “By joining with the female changeling?” she said, more statement than question. The contempt in her tone left no doubt about her disapproval of such an action.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What about the promises you made to our resistance cell?” she asked. “To the people who care about you?”

  “My people care about me too,” he said. It startled him a bit to hear in his voice an edge of indignation.

  “I’m sure that they do,” Kira said, though she sounded less than convinced of the point. “But the war isn’t about you. It’s about them.” She paused, and peered around the room—to her right, into the closet area, and left, toward the shower stall—as though she might find the next thing to say hidden among Dax’s things. Finally, she looked back at him and asked, “Did you have to link with her then, right at the time that we needed you?”

  “It just…happened,” Odo said, wanting to provide a better explanation than that, but unable to do so. “I didn’t plan it.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Kira said, her indictment of the Founder leader plain.

  “She didn’t either,” Odo avowed. “I was pressing her for information about our people and about the Great Link. I had so many questions…. I still have so many questions.”

  “You’ve had them for a long time,” Kira observed. “Couldn’t you have waited to ask them just a little bit later?”

  Odo shook his head from side to side. “The time just seemed right,” he said, not expecting Kira to understand. “It just happened. I’m not defending my choice. I’m simply telling you what took place. We linked because I asked questions, and words were insufficient to answer them. We linked, and everything else lost importance to me.”

  “And you don’t think that was her doing?” Kira asked, anger lacing her voice.

  “I know it wasn’t,” Odo said. “She didn’t force me to pose the questions I did. She didn’t force me to link with her.”

  Kira raised her hands from her knees and brought them back down with a slap. “Then how could you have done it?” she demanded.

  “And broken the promise I made to you?” he said. Kira had extracted a pledge from him that he would not link with the changeling leader again until after the end of the war.

  She looked at him, but did not answer.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” he told her.

  “I’m glad you see that,” she said. “Communicating on that level with the enemy—”

  “No,” Odo interrupted
. “I mean that I shouldn’t have made that promise to you.”

  “What?” Kira said. Her eyes widened in obvious incredulity. “How can you say that?”

  “Imagine if somebody tried to keep you from a natural relationship with your people,” he said, trying to make her see why she should never have asked of him what she had.

  “The Bajorans aren’t trying to destroy the inhabitants of the Alpha Quadrant,” she argued, her voice loud in the enclosed area. She waited for a moment, seeming to try to calm herself, then continued with a more modulated tenor. “Odo,” she said, “I wasn’t trying to keep you away from your people. I was trying to protect you and me and everybody the Founders are trying to kill.”

  “My linking with the female changeling didn’t expose the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant to danger,” Odo said. “Not to that sort of danger. The Link is not about exchanging information.”

  “I know you say that, but it doesn’t make sense to me,” Kira said. “Didn’t you just say that you were going to get answers to your questions through linking?”

  “Yes,” Odo said, “But the delivery of that sort of information—intellectual, and not emotional or sensory—has to be deliberate. In some ways, it’s almost like talking. You can speak with somebody about something without revealing confidential data you know.”

  “It’s more intimate than talking,” Kira said.

  “Yes,” Odo acknowledged. “But the point I wanted to convey was that linking with the female Founder didn’t mean that she had access to everything I knew. Nor was I compelled to reveal anything to her that I did not choose to reveal. As I’ve told you, linking is not about the communication of information. It’s about the fusion of the thought and form, the union of idea and sensation.”

  Kira’s head dropped. “I don’t understand what that means,” she said quietly.

  Odo tried to find a way to describe the experience. “It’s like—”

  “Don’t bother,” Kira stopped him, sounding resigned. “I know I’ll never understand what it means to link, because I’m not a changeling.”

  “I don’t agree,” Odo said. Kira looked back up at him. “Of course you’re not a changeling. Of course you can’t experience the Link the way I can. But I don’t think that means that you can’t come to understand it. I just need to determine how best to explain it to you, and maybe how to simulate the experience for you.”

  “Simulate it?” Kira said, clearly skeptical. “Even if you could figure out how to do that, it wouldn’t be the same thing.”

  “Not the same thing, no,” Odo said. “But it could go a long way to helping us understand one another better.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” Odo said. “I’m not a humanoid, but I’ve spent a great deal of my life in the form of a Bajoran, and so I was able to demonstrate what that means to the female Founder.”

  “What do you mean?” Kira asked.

  “I’m not a humanoid, she’s not a humanoid, so we can’t experience things in the same way that humanoids do,” Odo said. “We can take humanoid form, though, and I took it a step further for the female changeling and approximated the humanoid form of linking with her.”

  Kira’s jaw fell. “What are you saying?” she asked, clearly aghast.

  “I wanted to show her—”

  She bolted to her feet, her presence seeming to fill the small room. “Are you saying that, in addition to linking with her, you slept with her?”

  “Well…yes,” Odo said, feeling somewhat offended by Kira’s reaction. “But it wasn’t—” He stopped as Kira reached for the control panel beside the doors. An instant later, they slid open. “Nerys,” he said, trying to keep her from leaving. She didn’t respond, but rushed past him, her right leg brushing against his left as she did so.

  As he turned to watch her stride across the bedroom, he realized that things between them would never be the same again.

  3

  Odo sat on the speck of land, his back against one of the rock spires. He had raised his eyes to the dim sky, but he no longer saw the stars as he recalled that night in Dax’s closet with Kira. Those hours with her seemed so far away, the events of their lives intervening between then and now like a broad chasm that forever separated yesterday from today. He could peer across the gulf and see what had come before, but he could never return there.

  Even awash in his memories, Odo felt the passage of time in a way he did not within the Great Link. He’d come to understand that he needed that, needed to measure the hours and days, the weeks and months as they elapsed. If there was to be change in the Founders, if he was to help guide them from their past of suspicion, fear, and violence, to a future of acceptance, understanding, and peace, it would take time. The Link seemed slow to change, but not impervious to it.

  When he’d first rejoined his changeling family after the war, Odo had found his people mired in unrest. As individual Founders came back to the Link, bringing with them reports of the continuing outcome of their defeat to the powers of the Alpha Quadrant, the turmoil increased. Odo hoped that his own return would calm their communal emotion, but the reverse was true. His rejoining prompted both excitement and agitation, the Link joyous to have back one of the Hundred, but troubled at the ideas he brought back with him. Indeed, his notions of peaceful coexistence with solids, and nonviolent resolution to disturbances within the Dominion, were met not only with skepticism, but with defiance. The Founders reacted swiftly and severely to rebellions kindled on some of their subject worlds by the Alpha Quadrant’s victory in the war, sending in Vorta with Jem’Hadar troops to restore order.

  Eventually, though, Odo had perceived a change. The Link seemed to settle down, and resistance to his ideas diminished, if only slightly. But then he left to pursue the rumors of an Ascendant, and the reports that had led him to Opaka. When he came back this time, he expected to find his people in much the same emotional state as when he’d left them. Instead, he encountered tremendous agitation, which had only increased in the weeks that followed. Now, as he pulled his gaze from the heavens and peered out over the Great Link, he saw that its surface had grown choppy, and he knew that the return of Laas had stirred even greater emotion in the Founders.

  Ahead of Odo, a whine suddenly grew out of the silence, as though emanating from the surface of the islet. He quickly stood, not comfortable being seen in such a relaxed position. A moment later, the air seemed to solidify, glints of light flashing and then thickening to a mass of color. When the transport had completed, it had deposited Weyoun there.

  “Founder,” he said, and this time, Odo felt a look of annoyance cross his features before he could stop it. “Odo,” Weyoun corrected himself. “I noted your prolonged presence here, and I wanted to see if you required anything.”

  “No, Weyoun, I don’t,” Odo said. “But thank you.” Most of the islands sprinkled throughout the changeling sea—including this one—had communications equipment cached on them so that a Founder could contact any of the Jem’Hadar vessels in orbit. But the Vorta also monitored the planet, an added precaution against interlopers, and a means of anticipating the needs of the Great Link.

  Weyoun inclined his head slightly. “It is always my pleasure to serve,” he said. He took a couple of paces toward Odo. “Will you be transporting up to—”

  “Weyoun,” Odo said sharply, holding the flat of his hand out. The Vorta stopped walking, just as a grinding sound emerged from beneath his feet. He had stepped into the remains of the dead changeling.

  “Odo?” he asked, peering down at the gray ashes. He backed up quickly, then looked up with an expression that appeared equal parts disbelief and dismay. Odo did not know if Weyoun had ever seen the dusty vestiges of a dead Founder, or if he reacted simply from intuition. It seemed apparent, though, that he at least suspected the nature of what lay before him.

  “It is a dead changeling,” Odo confirmed. “Laas brought it back with him.”

  Weyoun’s mouth opened soundless
ly as he regarded the mass of ashes, the look on his face transformed now into one of horror. Odo went to him, striding across the islet until he stood beside him. He reached out and took hold of Weyoun’s upper arms, forcing the Vorta to turn and face him. “Weyoun, it’s all right,” he intoned. “It’s—” He paused, wondering about the truth of his own words. How could the death of a Founder ever be all right? And yet, the universe would not end, the life of the Great Link would not stop. Odo still had responsibilities, still had duties to perform, chief among them right now, learning the Great Link’s reaction to Laas and then dealing with it accordingly.

  “It’s all right,” he told Weyoun once more. “Go back to the ship. I’ll probably beam up later.”

  Weyoun nodded vacantly, then stepped back and reached for the transporter control wrapped about his wrist. Before he could trigger it, Odo said, “Keep this to yourself for now.” Though he did not necessarily agree, he knew that the Founders would be reluctant to allow news of the death of one of their own to disseminate through their empire. Weyoun nodded again, and then activated the transporter. Odo watched as his body dematerialized amid a quick shimmering of light.

  Alone again on the islet, he considered what to do with the remains of the lost changeling. He realized that he did not know if his people practiced funerary customs. When the Founder who’d infiltrated Defiant had been killed—accidentally pushed by Odo against the containment field surrounding the warp core—Starfleet had taken possession of the remains. And when the unformed changeling that had been brought to DS9 and nurtured by Odo had died, it had somehow infused itself into Odo’s body. The latter event caused him to wonder now if incorporating the remains of the dead back into the Great Link might be what the Founders normally did. He would need to find out.

  Odo walked to the edge of the land, where he turned his mind’s eye inward, to the flows and eddies of his changeling anatomy. He felt his cells quicken, and his body gelled into an inchoate mass. He reached out over the Link and down, into its wavering collective.