Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three Page 29

  “He did, but I do not entirely understand,” Taran’atar admitted. “I am to experience living among the species of the Alpha Quadrant. I would never question the wisdom of a Founder, but I do not understand why this is necessary, or why I—or any Jem’Hadar—would be selected for such a mission. We were bred for war.”

  “Yes, you were,” she agreed. “Did Odo tell you for what period of time he would require you to stay in the Alpha Quadrant?”

  “He did not,” Taran’atar said. “But during his recent visit to Deep Space—”

  “His recent visit?” the Founder asked, her voice rising to emphasize the middle word.

  “Odo spent nearly four weeks on Deep Space 9 and Bajor,” Taran’atar explained, “until he left to go back to the Great Link almost three months ago.”

  “Why was he there?” she asked.

  “Odo told me that he wanted to check on my progress,” Taran’atar said. “He also accepted an invitation from the Bajorans to attend a ceremony in which they entered the Federation. I believe that he also wanted to see Kira.”

  “Of course,” the Founder said. “His loyalties are still divided.”

  The assertion startled Taran’atar. Although he did not understand the reasons why he had been sent to live in the Alpha Quadrant, and although he wished to return to the Dominion, he had never mistrusted Odo. “I would not presume to evaluate the loyalties of a Founder,” he said. Except…he thought. Except had he not come here to have this Founder give him new orders—orders that would supersede Odo’s?

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” the Founder said. “You are not capable of doing so. But I am.” Again, she turned and strode away from him. “Odo lived for decades in the Alpha Quadrant, among solids,” she said, although Taran’atar could not tell whether she meant her words for him or only for herself. “He developed feelings for one of them, for Kira, and that emotion, born in a life warped by exposure to solids and isolation from his own kind, still drives him.”

  She stopped walking beside a small, potted tree, its short branches adorned with pentagonal leaves of various colors, from blue and violet on the lower branches, to red and yellow on the upper. Large thorns decorated its narrow trunk in parallel lines that swirled around it. As the Founder continued talking, she reached out and took hold of the trunk three-quarters of the way up.

  “Odo seeks to change the Dominion, to change the Great Link itself, to alter the natural order of things.” As she spoke, her hand began to display a flickering orange glow, and her fingers elongated, encircling the tree as her newly formed tendrils climbed upward and descended downward. “He foolishly wants to engender some sort of direct relationship between our people and the solids, so that he can unite his places in both worlds, and keep both the Great Link and Kira in his life.”

  The shining extensions of her hand now wrapping around the branches of the tree, the Founder looked back over her shoulder at Taran’atar. “But such efforts will never work,” she said. “Even Odo, with his inexperience, will come to understand that one day.”

  Captured by her stare, Taran’atar felt compelled to respond. “As you say,” he told her.

  “And when he fails,” she went on, as though Taran’atar had not spoken, “he will abandon the Great Link, and he will return to Kira. Not just for weeks, but for as long as Kira lives.” A branch snapped beneath the entwining grip of the Founder’s form, and then a second snapped as well. Taran’atar watched as the shimmering tendrils constricted, solidifying into milky white tentacles. Suddenly, the tree splintered, its trunk and limbs flying fragmented to the floor, its leaves fluttering down in a rainbow of movement. “Odo will flout the sacrifice I have made for our people,” the Founder ended.

  Taran’atar did not know how to react to what he took to be her show of anger. “Your sacrifice saved the Great Link,” he said, understanding that her establishment of peace with the powers of the Alpha Quadrant had allowed Odo to bring a cure to the Founders when they had been assaulted by disease.

  “It did,” she said, raising her voice as she turned fully toward him. The pale appendages extending from her arm had fallen to the floor when the tree had broken beneath their clutches, and they remained there now, unmoving. “I agreed to end the war, to give myself over to my enemies…” She began walking toward Taran’atar, the extensions of her fingers trailing behind her, as though being dragged like something not a part of her own body. “…to relinquish my freedom at the hands of the lowly solids, all in order to save the Great Link…and to save Odo.”

  “To save Odo?” Taran’atar said, confused. The Founder’s demeanor seemed odd to him, and he wondered if her isolation had affected her.

  “He was one of the Hundred,” she said. She abruptly stopped, looked upward, and threw her arms into the air. The tendrils contracted in an instant back into her hand, but then both of her arms wavered and separated into scores of slender filaments. They reached up toward the ceiling and curved back down at their tips, which ended in sparkling silver lights. The effect put Taran’atar in mind of a field of stars, somehow brought down from the sky to twinkle just a couple of meters overhead. “And I was one of those who decided to send him and the others away. But I wanted our people to survive and to be whole again. I had no choice but to send the Hundred away.”

  Taran’atar knew of the hundred changelings that had been seeded throughout space by the Great Link, but he did not understand the points the Founder appeared to be trying to make. He did not see how dividing the Great Link and sending individual changelings away could possibly help the Founders survive, or paradoxically, be whole. But he said nothing.

  The Founder looked at him. “You know of the disease that struck my people,” she said. She dropped her arms, and the filaments she had sent into the air fell to the floor with a strange, whispering sound, as though dozens of inaudible voices had spoken at once, combining to be heard. “My sacrifice in agreeing to come here, to be kept as a prisoner…my sacrifice saved Odo by seeing to it that he returned to the Great Link.”

  Taran’atar continued to say nothing, his muscles rigid as he stood motionless before the Founder.

  “The Great Link,” she said, repeating her own words, but acting as though responding to somebody else. “Do you bring word of the Great Link?” she asked.

  “I do not, Founder,” he said, unable to ignore a direct question. “I can tell you that before Odo sent me to the Alpha Quadrant, he spoke of the Great Link being in turmoil, of having to deal with the loss in the war, and with rebellions that had arisen within the Dominion after that. But on his recent trip, Odo talked about the Link having calmed in recent months, and of the insurgencies quieting.”

  The Founder nodded absently, her eyes focusing past Taran’atar. With no warning, she raised her arms again, and the willowy strands projecting from them retracted. A moment later, they had formed into hands again. The Founder looked at him once more.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, her tone reverting to its formerly measured tenor. “Why have you come to see me in this prison?”

  “I am here—” he began, and thought, because I am lost, because I do not belong in the Alpha Quadrant, because I want to go back to the Dominion, and to being a soldier. But instead, he said, “—because I wish to be of whatever service I can be to you.”

  “I see,” she said as she retreated back across the room, hands clasped behind her back. “And of what service do you expect to be?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought that, since you’ve been away from the Dominion and the Great Link for so long now, I hoped that I might be able to offer some…relief…of that circumstance.”

  She spun sharply on her heel. “And you suppose that your presence here would do that for me, would allay the misery of my seclusion?”

  “I don’t know,” Taran’atar said again, and he realized that what he had told Kira, what he had told himself, about wanting to ease the isolation of the Founder, had been nothing but a cover. He had kept
from Kira his true motivation for wanting to come here, but he had lied to himself as well, professing a desire to help the Founder when he had known that he would be unable to do so. What sort of impact could a Jem’Hadar have on a Founder separated from the Great Link? No, the only reasons he had come here had been to get help for himself.

  And now he would seek that help.

  “I need your assistance, Founder,” he said. “I am a Jem’Hadar soldier. I do not belong in the Alpha Quadrant. I do not belong without ketracel-white being fed into my body. I need guidance, but I have no means of contacting Odo.”

  “And so you thought to visit the only other Founder you could,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You seek my permission to leave the post to which Odo assigned you,” she said.

  “I would not defy the will of a god,” Taran’atar said, “but Odo is not the only god.”

  “Nor am I,” she said, her voice rising almost to a yell. “I am no god at all.” Again, Taran’atar wondered if her captivity had impacted her emotional state, or even her mind. He dismissed the thought, even as he recalled the Jem’Hadar first on Sindorin, who had maintained that the Founders were not gods, and that the Jem’Hadar of the Dominion were no more than slaves. Taran’atar had denied both allegations because he’d believed them false, and he still did. This had been his life, and he had always known that until the day he died in battle defending the Founders, this would continue to be his life.

  Except that Odo had changed all of that. And now this Founder stood before him and threatened to change it even more.

  “Founder,” he began, but she spoke before he could go on.

  “The Founders are not gods,” she said. “We developed the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta into what they are now, we are powerful and superior to all solids. But the one, true God—the Progenitor—created the Founders.”

  Taran’atar said nothing at first. The Founder needed his help, he realized, but he did not know what to do. As he’d told Kira, attempting to break the Founder out of this facility would put her life at risk. At the same time, her imprisonment had clearly had a deleterious effect on her.

  “Let me serve you, Founder,” he said at last, hoping that she would know what he could do to help her.

  “Your servitude means nothing to me,” she said. “You lost the war.” Taran’atar immediately wanted to tell her that he had not fought for the Dominion against the forces of the Alpha Quadrant, but also understood that such information would likely not matter to her. “If you had been strong enough,” she went on, “if the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta had been able to properly control the Cardassians and the Breen, then the Dominion would have conquered the Federation and the Klingons and the Romulans. And victory would have rendered my sacrifice unnecessary.”

  Taran’atar waited to see if she would say more. When it became clear that she would not, he quietly asked, “Founder, please, how can I serve you?”

  “Leave me,” she said.

  Taran’atar stared at the Founder, feeling paralyzed. He did not wish to disobey her, nor did he wish to abandon her to this fate. He longed for the life he had once known, where he knew his place as a soldier and his responsibilities to the Founders, and where he understood how to fulfill his duties. Since Odo had sent him here to the Alpha Quadrant, though, he’d lost his way.

  Taran’atar turned toward the inner door, preparing to go, but then he paused. How long would he have to live his life like this, he wondered, his soldier’s duties past, his value to his gods incomprehensibly low? Perhaps the Jem’Hadar on Sindorin had been right after all: perhaps Taran’atar was only a slave, of no more worth to his creators than a cog in a machine.

  He turned back around. “Founder,” he said.

  Odo’s pliable cells spun as he joined hands with Laas. After studying aboard the Jem’Hadar vessel the records concerning the Hundred, they had transported back down to the Founders’ world, intending to seek out Indurane to tell him what they’d learned. Now, to that end, they melded together and twisted up from the surface of the islet. Odo felt the familiar rush of his link with another changeling, the reactive unity defined by the marriage of idea—at the moment, the search for the ancient Founder—and sensation—the circular velocity of their entangled bodies as they spiraled upward. Pushing counter to gravity, they slowed and turned, arcing to the side and then down. As one, they plunged into the living sea formed by the union of their people.

  Even before Odo reached out into the Great Link, he discerned the change in it. What he had sensed for the past month as a mixture of disquiet and enthusiasm had exploded into unrestrained excitement. More than he had ever experienced, the community of Founders seethed, its currents swirling into a massive maelstrom, a cauldron veritably boiling with movement. Figures took shape at a dizzying rate, solid forms blooming in the golden changeling deep like insects in amber, and then just as quickly dissolving back into the metamorphic essence from which they’d been sculpted. Odo perceived the untold shapes around him, along with a flood of thoughts, an effect not unlike the indistinguishable gesticulations and voices of a mob. He tried to attune his own mind to the scuttle of form and contemplation surrounding and inundating him, and could make out only one consistent concept: the Progenitor.

  Odo quickly concluded that locating Indurane amid the turbulence of the Great Link would not be a simple matter. Still joined with him, Laas shared this thought and concurred with it. In the next moment, Odo felt the emptiness he always felt at the dissipation of a link with another Founder, as Laas separated from him. Odo reached out—first to Laas, and then to the rest of the changeling mass—sending his body scattering, but still intact, in all directions, like a pool of water dropped into an ocean. His perceptions expanded as his senses joined with those around him, and then spread again as his connections with those changelings extended through their own swarm of connections.

  Laas, he thought, even as he identified his fellow member of the Hundred rocketing through the Great Link, a sleek, streamlined projectile slicing horizontally along, like a waterborne torpedo. His rapid motion meshed with the environment of elation all about them. Laas, initially troubled by the notion of a Founder god, had grown exhilarated as he and Odo had discussed the subject, and had wanted to urge Indurane and the Link to determine whether or not the Progenitor had indeed returned. Odo, intrigued but skeptical, had questions for Indurane.

  Beneath the surface of the Link, Laas suddenly changed direction. His projectile form veered upward and broke through the top of the changeling sea, surging into the air. Through the communal senses of his people, Odo watched without eyes as Laas’s flesh glistened, altering its contours. Thin, broad appendages appeared, stretching outward in a flash. The wings flapped once, twice, a third time, carrying Laas higher into the sky. Then he transformed again, rolling into a glowing sphere, almost too brilliant to view. The miniature sun hovered, and Odo marveled at Laas’s abilities, wondering precisely how he had constituted his body to emulate a burning star and at the same time remain suspended in the air. Gradually, the fiery orb increased in brightness, until it became clear that Laas intended the faux nova to mimic the real thing that still dominated the sky of the Founders’ world.

  Around Odo, the Link grew more animated. He hunted for Indurane, and found his sensory pursuit directed back to the dual-peaked islet he frequented. There, a changeling climbed from the Great Link and onto land. It rose to a humanoid height, then shifted, most of its glowing orange façade darkening to the brown of the militia uniform Odo still simulated when he took Bajoran form, the rest of it lightening into the pale skin tones of a face and hands. When the alteration had completed, Odo saw a replica of himself standing there. He recognized the invitation to him, and knew Indurane to be the one offering it.

  Odo drew his body into itself and hied toward the islet, until he lifted himself up onto land to face his own image. “You wanted to see me,” Odo said, not asking a question, but stating a fact. “Laas and
I wanted to see you.”

  As if in response, the changeling adjusted its form once more, the manifestation of Odo blurring momentarily, then clarifying into that of a male Bajoran, the same one that Indurane had previously taken. Beyond him, in the distance, the brilliant sphere Laas had become continued to increase in intensity. “You have information,” Indurane said, also not phrasing his words as a question.

  “I do,” Odo said, and told him of the study of the Hundred that he and Laas had made, and their determination that if the placement of the array of unformed changelings throughout the galaxy had been intended as both a lure and a return map for the Progenitor, then it pointed directly to the region now containing the nova.

  “We are aware of this,” Indurane said, clearly speaking for all of the Great Link. “We have kept that area under observation, and we knew of the nova’s existence when it first occurred, but it meant little to us until it appeared here, in our own sky. Since that moment, we have been drawn to it.”

  Odo suddenly remembered what he had felt when he’d first spied the nova seemingly looming above the Founders’ world. His initial dread, motivated by a concern for his people, had given way to hopefulness once he’d transported down to the planet and viewed the star from that perspective. Apparently like Indurane and the rest of the Link, he’d also felt its pull on his awareness.

  “We believe that the image of the starburst was implanted by the Progenitor in the minds of the Founders,” Indurane said, as though explaining Odo’s feelings, “just as we who sent out the Hundred implanted the image of the Omarion Nebula in their minds.” The notion bolstered the belief that the changeling god had created the Great Link in its own image. Past Indurane, Laas’s radiant form faded, then dropped back into the Link.

  “And you believe that the Progenitor has returned there?” Odo asked, though the answer seemed clear.

  “I do,” Indurane said. “We do.” He looked to the side, his gaze taking in the changeling deep surrounding the islet.