Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three Page 24

  She leaned forward in her chair and worked the runabout’s primary station, cycling Rio Grande up to full power. For a few moments, only the beat of the engines and the electronic chirps of the controls dressed the cabin, until she opened a comm channel to Yolja. With Bowers, she coordinated the launches of the two runabouts, and obtained clearance from Mjolnir’s bridge, currently under the watch of the ship’s first officer. A minute later, Kira watched through Rio Grande’s viewports as Yolja glided forward just a couple of meters above the decking. It reached the force field and punched through, a flash of bright, blue pinpoints sparking about the hull as it flew out into space. The new runabout immediately assumed a downward trajectory in order to clear the wing structures that supported Mjolnir’s warp nacelles.

  After confirming that Yolja had reached a safe distance, Kira worked the flight controls. “Prepare for launch,” she said automatically, her fingers skipping in practiced movements across the main panel, extracting from it the measured tones that accompanied its operation. The runabout lifted from the deck, its antigravs engaged, then followed Yolja’s path, first off of the ship, and then down and away from Mjolnir’s nacelle supports. “Setting course for Ananke Alpha,” she announced as she set Rio Grande’s navigational parameters. Around them, the thrum of the drive rose and then evened out as it took the small ship to warp.

  Kira studied the readouts for a few moments more, verifying the runabout’s route, velocity, and overall performance. Satisfied, she leaned back and peered over at Taran’atar. He still sat stiffly in his chair, facing forward. She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again when she could not determine how to start.

  Although Taran’atar could never have been accurately described as social, Kira had perceived an increased iciness in him of late. He’d been more reticent, less approachable, and had not seemed as inclined as previously to spend time observing life among the residents of the station, the task Odo had set him. Kira knew that Taran’atar had recently found it necessary to sleep a few times a week, an aberration for his species. She’d assumed that had been troubling him, and that the changes she’d perceived in him had been the result. Still, perhaps more than at any time since he’d arrived at DS9, she felt intensely aware of him being a Jem’Hadar, along with all that implied: the physical prowess, the extensive military training and experience, and the determination bred into him to follow and serve the Founders. And that last fact concerned Kira more than anything else right now: Taran’atar’s devotion to his gods. After all, what would she not do herself in order to satisfy the will of a Prophet?

  “Are you looking forward to this?” she asked him, the monotonous drone of the warp drive an undercurrent of sound in the cabin.

  “I am doing what my duty dictates I do,” he said, continuing to face forward.

  “Right, I understand that,” Kira said, although when Taran’atar had first made his request, he’d phrased it in a way that had implied his motivation to be more personal. “But I thought that you might still want to do this, apart from its being your duty.” When he did not respond, she asked, “Is that the case?”

  Taran’atar turned to look at her. His face bore no discernible expression, but the gaze of his dark eyes held her as surely as if he’d forcibly restrained her. “I am doing what my duty dictates I do,” he said again. “That is all.” He clearly did not appreciate being questioned, particularly about his motivations. Kira had recognized that in him a long time ago: he knew his purpose, and that purpose determined his actions; he considered questions irrelevant and a waste of time.

  Kira nodded to Taran’atar, acknowledging his response, then looked back over at her station. In her peripheral vision, she saw him do the same. I have to trust him, she thought. During his stay at DS9, he’d given her no reason not to do so. He’d followed her orders without question, as Odo had instructed him to do, and he’d been instrumental in the successful resolution of a crisis on more than one occasion. More than that, the success of Taran’atar’s visit to the Alpha Quadrant could influence the course of relations with the Dominion for some time to come. Kira therefore felt that she had to do everything she could to help him fulfill his mission. And right now, that meant trusting him.

  She leaned forward and touched a control, then another, checking Rio Grande’s course. Then, with nothing else to do, she settled back in her chair, lacing her fingers together in her lap. She thought about getting a raktajino, but decided against it. Instead, she gazed through the viewport and out at the stars as the runabout flew on, headed for Ananke Alpha, the Federation prison facility where Taran’atar would soon visit the Founder leader.

  Exhaustion and an unflagging ache enveloped Odo, like those times when, after holding form for an extended period, he was unable to return to his natural state. Anger welled within him, directed not at Indurane, but at the whole of the Great Link. Had his people hidden this information from him—information obviously essential to understanding them—or had they sent one of their number to lie to him now for some concealed purpose? They had done both in the past, but in this case, Odo simply could not credit what he had just been told.

  You’re lying, he told Indurane through their interface. Odo expected the charge to be met with denial, but instead, Indurane replied with a question.

  Have you ever known a changeling infant? he asked.

  I was a changeling infant, Odo responded. Laas was a changeling infant.

  Indurane seemed to pause before answering. Around them, the Great Link continued to stir agitatedly. But Odo could not attend to those matters right now; he had to concentrate on his union with Indurane.

  Were you an infant? the old changeling finally asked. Was Laas?

  Odo wanted to answer affirmatively, definitively, but his career as an investigator told him that he needed to consider the evidence before he could reach a meaningful conclusion. He drew on the facts he had at hand, and found few that bore on Indurane’s assertion. Odo knew that he had been discovered in the Bajoran system, in the Denorios Belt, decades ago. While he had only a vague memory of the event—merely an impression really—Bajoran and Cardassian records, as well as several Bajorans and Cardassians, provided support that it had actually occurred. Odo’s own awareness had come later, along with the ability to consciously shapeshift. Laas had related a similar tale about his own life, although he had been found by the Varalans more than two centuries ago.

  Little in either Odo’s story or Laas’s, but for their limited memories of their pasts, provided any sort of substantiation that they had both been infants at some point. Such a deduction relied more on assumption than actual fact. It seemed clear that both he and Laas had each been unformed at one time in their lives, but did it unavoidably follow that they had been infants?

  Odo recalled the words of the changeling leader when he had first met her. He had been drawn to the world in the Omarion Nebula where the Founders had lived then, and had told her that he wished he could have remembered the place as his home. “It’s understandable that you cannot,” she’d explained. “You were still newly formed when you left us.”

  “Newly formed?” he had asked her. “You mean I was an infant?”

  “An infant,” she had replied, as though pondering a concept that did not entirely make sense to her—or perhaps to any changeling. She’d then finished by saying, “Yes,” but Odo allowed now that the answer could have been a part of her calculations in dispensing limited information about the Founders to him. For later, when he’d questioned her about how long he had been away from the Great Link, she’d said, “A long time.” Odo realized now that, if he had been away for, say, a century, then he had clearly not been an infant when he’d been found in the Bajor system just a few decades ago. And that implied that being an unformed changeling did not mean being an infant changeling.

  But how can that be true? Odo wondered, still unable to believe that his people could not reproduce. He clung physically to Indurane, their cells meshing through th
eir link, as he contemplated what he grasped of how species survived in the universe. Those that developed characteristics necessary and sufficient to their continued existence endured; those that did not met with extinction. And absolutely vital for a species to survive, it needed to be able to produce offspring. For without succeeding generations, how could the natural attrition caused by death be overcome? Unless…unless the Founders did not experience death.

  Odo rejected the idea at once. We are not immortal, he offered, part declaration, part question. As fanciful as the notion of an unending lifetime seemed, it would at least provide some sort of justification for Indurane’s contention that the Founders could not procreate.

  Intertwined with Odo, Indurane modified his cells again, matching them to their surroundings so that it appeared as though he had vanished. The significance of the shift remained the same as earlier: nonexistence. Indurane concluded by affirming the idea that Odo had hesitantly proffered: We are not immortal.

  But then how can the Founders lack the ability to reproduce? Odo questioned. How could we have possibly evolved that way?

  The Founders did not evolve, Indurane averred, his cells adjusting to form a shapeless mass once more. We are not some random event in space and time, he continued, his contempt for such a concept manifest. We are not the result of some fortuitous juxtaposition of matter and energy.

  But then how? Odo reiterated, even as Indurane’s body grew, the volume of space he filled increasing radically. Left as a small body linked to the suddenly sizable changeling, Odo waited for Indurane’s thoughts to reinforce the answer he had given by way of his form.

  The Great Link was generated by design, he claimed. The Founder population was created in its entirety by the Progenitor.

  Disconcerted, Odo thought of the Bajorans. His people were different from Kira’s kind, he knew, this belief was different from theirs, and yet he could not fathom the reality of what Indurane had just revealed: a Founder god.

  Kira looked up from her readouts as the tractor beam took hold of Rio Grande. Already she’d had to relinquish control of the runabout’s weapons, and now its drive systems. The ship shuddered mildly, the inertial dampers disrupted briefly by the contact with the directed-energy field. Through the forward viewports, Kira spied the telltale blue luminescence that she knew now surrounded the runabout. Just visible past the glow, Ananke Alpha hung alone in space, a slim, crescent-shaped slice of the sphere illuminated by the planetless star that hosted it.

  Located in a remote and untraveled region of Federation space, in a system that offered virtually nothing in either useful natural resources or interesting characteristics, the facility provided little likelihood for detection by even itinerant voyagers. The dark metal object measured less than a kilometer in diameter, and maintained a low sensor profile, emitting microwaves that mimicked the background radiation of the universe. A lightless speck that saw extremely few visitors, and whose few inhabitants practiced almost complete radio silence, Ananke Alpha would have been difficult to find without assistance. A small sensor-and-communications station tucked indiscernibly into an asteroid—one of several, Kira assumed—had passively scanned Rio Grande when it had approached the system, had authenticated its identity, and then guided it toward the facility. Now, Kira disengaged power to the engines so that the prison’s tractor beam could bring the runabout in the rest of the way; had she not done so, the crew of Ananke Alpha would have fired upon the ship.

  The procedures enforced here had been meticulously delineated for Kira by Admiral Ross. Until their meeting, Kira hadn’t even been aware of the prison’s existence, though she easily could have presupposed the necessity for something like it within the Federation. According to the admiral, it had been designed and constructed half a century ago, for the purpose of incarcerating a small number of criminals, those evaluated as the most dangerous and the most difficult to confine. After the end of the Dominion War, the few prisoners detained there had been transferred to other facilities, and the prison had been overhauled and modified so that it could safely and effectively hold its new, single inmate: the female changeling.

  Kira peered again through the viewports—she could now make out the rest of the globe’s shadowed body—and then over at Taran’atar. He’d said very little during their long journey, and only when Kira had spoken first. All of his responses had been terse, if not unfriendly. Since he’d arrived on Deep Space 9, he’d tended toward the laconic in his communications, but his taciturnity had peaked during this time aboard the runabout and the days leading up to it.

  Why shouldn’t he act that way? Kira thought. How would she feel, how would she behave, if presented with the prospect of a one-on-one meeting with a Prophet? While she did not consider the Founders to be gods—far from it—she knew that the Vorta and the Jem’Hadar did.

  But he just spent weeks with Odo, she argued with herself. She’d observed some of their interactions, and although Taran’atar had been deferential to Odo, perhaps even reverential toward him, he hadn’t been awed into near-silence. Now, though—

  Admit it, she reproached herself. Admit what’s really concerning you. Kira typically had little difficulty expressing her feelings, either to herself or to others. If anything, the reverse had been true, and she’d had to learn to be more diplomatic during her tenure on DS9.

  “Taran’atar,” she said.

  “Yes?” He responded without looking at her. She said nothing more, waiting until at last he turned toward her. “Yes, Captain?” he said.

  “Why do you want to visit the Founder?” she asked him.

  “I’ve already told you my reasons,” he said, turning back to face forward once more.

  “I know that,” Kira said, keeping her tone even. “I’m asking you to tell me again.”

  He did not answer right away, and for a moment, Kira thought that he might not reply at all. But in the months he’d been on the station, he had yet to disobey any order she’d given him. He did not do so now. “I wish to be of some small service to my gods,” he said.

  “How?” Kira persisted.

  He looked at her again. “The Founder has been alone for a long time now, separated from the Great Link since shortly after the war started, and isolated from the entire Dominion since the end of hostilities,” Taran’atar explained. “I hope to be able to offer some relief for that circumstance.”

  This had been the reason—the very personal reason, she thought—that Taran’atar had cited when he’d first come to her with his request. It sounded plausible to her, both then and now. Taran’atar had obviously convinced Admiral Ross of his motives as well. But regardless of the justification for the visit, just the fact that Taran’atar would be interacting with the female Founder concerned Kira. What if the changeling gave him new orders? Would the immediacy of those orders supersede Odo’s directives to Taran’atar? And what if…what if—

  “Are you going to attempt to free the Founder?” she asked bluntly. Like herself Kira knew Taran’atar appreciated candor. Still, his horned brow raised in apparent surprise at her question.

  “No, I have no intention of breaking the Founder from her prison,” he said. “For the sake of the Dominion, she has decided on this course, and I must respect that.” In exchange for Odo saving the Great Link from extinction by providing the cure for the disease wracking their people, the female changeling had agreed to stand trial and accept responsibility for her actions with respect to the war. In the end, though, she’d waived her Federation right to a trial and had pled guilty to the numerous charges leveled against her. She had been sentenced to life imprisonment in a maximum-security facility, where she would be kept in isolation, both as part of her punishment, and as a safety precaution. Unsure of the ethics of interning for life such a long-lived being—the Founder had admitted to an existence that had lasted more than seven centuries already—the Federation had also decided to revisit the judgment every fifty years.

  Kira considered what Taran’atar had
told her, and realized that he hadn’t entirely quelled her concerns. He had spoken of his intentions only, and not of his possible actions. “What if the Founder wants you to free her?” she asked.

  “Captain Kira,” Taran’atar said, “I have no doubt that if the Founder wished to escape her confinement, she could do so without my assistance.”

  Rio Grande was jarred slightly, and Kira recognized the sensation of the runabout passing through a forcefield. She looked again through the viewports, and saw that they had been towed close enough to Ananke Alpha now that she could make out features on its surface: weapons turrets, shield generators, and directly ahead, a single-paneled door opening to reveal a shuttlebay. “My question wasn’t about your intentions, Taran’atar,” she said, and looked over at him again. “What will you do if the Founder orders you to break her out? Would you disobey her, or do as she commanded?”

  “Admiral Ross asked the same question,” Taran’atar told her. “Captain, if you were asked to do something by one of your gods—by one of the Prophets—can you imagine a scenario in which you would not abide them?”

  No, Kira thought at once, and did not like the answer. Taran’atar had implied an equivalence between her potential actions and his own, meaning that if asked to do so by the Founder, he would abet her attempt to flee her captivity. Kira did not believe they would succeed; Ross had described the facility as a fortress, essentially impossible to escape. He’d maintained that any effort to break out of Ananke Alpha would result in failure, with the death of the prisoner a possible outcome. And though it seemed clear to Kira that the death of the Founder would serve neither the Federation nor the Dominion—