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

  Still, whatever the case, it did not diminish the ache he felt at the obvious death of a changeling life here. He also had no doubt that the pain suffered now by Indurane and the others, all believing the Progenitor dead, dwarfed his own. Odo could only imagine what they felt. Indurane seemed unable to move right now, and the others had found it impossible to remain here; Odo assumed that they would return to the ship, as an unassisted journey back to the Founders’ world would last decades, perhaps even centuries.

  Laas revised his structure again, forming the same shapes that one of the Founders had aboard ship during the voyage here: a deep, open plane representing space, with the Progenitor rising above it. Their God? Laas questioned, wondered. Our God?

  I don’t know, Odo responded, his body transitioning through several conversions, from an empty sphere to approximations of the other Founders that had accompanied them here. But the others think so. Indurane thinks so.

  Indurane, Laas thought, briefly taking the ancient changeling’s form. Odo understood and agreed that they needed to go to him.

  Together, Odo and Laas bent toward the surface and pushed along through the lifeless shapeshifter dust. They approached the figure of Indurane, his unmoving body appearing lifeless in the low light. Odo let his thoughts drift inward, and he and Laas extended tendrils toward the old changeling. Their malleable cells flattened and came into contact with Indurane’s, and—

  —Odo fell through an endless void, darkness his only companion. He’d been plunging down from the beginning, he understood, and would continue to descend until swallowed up by the merciless maw of time. He saw nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing about him but the hollowness of oblivion. Space had gone, and time, although the latter somehow waited to devour the end of his days, and him along with it. The external universe had ceased to exist. Soon so would he. So would they all.

  He perceived the contradictions. Of his descent through nothingness, with nothingness as his destination. Of time destroyed, and yet time lingering, itself a destroyer. Of the eventuality of a solitary death, experienced with all of his people. And all of this with reality already no more than a memory. Light did not reach his eyes, sound did not reach his ears, no percepts of any kind reached any facet of his senses.

  But still he could feel. Shock. Horror. Grief. And worst of all, a desolation that mirrored and magnified the infinite emptiness through which he plummeted.

  The Progenitor was dead. Hope had perished with It. He would live alone now, they would all live alone now, and together, they would die alone. Extinction beckoned.

  Odo witnessed himself falling, and accepted it, knew it useless to resist the inevitable. He observed the nebulous pool of his biomimetic material hurtling downward. Then, without warning, he saw himself alter his shape, taking on a form not his own. Rapt, he watched the new figure reach weakly forward with a newly formed hand, saw a mouth open and try to speak as—

  —Indurane asked without words to go home. Odo pulled away from him, trying to break their link. But he remained connected to Laas, and Laas to Indurane, and so the feelings and thoughts of the ancient Founder continued to inundate him, although at a slightly lesser intensity.

  Laas, Odo called, wanting not to locate and contact his mind, but to disconnect him from the devastated, forlorn mind of Indurane. Laas, he called again, and began to tug gently at his body, striving to pull him free of the unrelenting despair in which Odo himself had just been caught. Finally, Laas slipped his link with Indurane, leaving him joined only with Odo.

  Death? Laas thought, but it came as a question, and Odo knew that the belief in the Progenitor, and that It no longer lived, had impacted Laas far less than it had Indurane, or apparently the others.

  Before Odo could respond, a slight vibration reached him from nearby. Odo quickly sent a tendril out to where he had dropped the scanner, and found the device half buried in the ashes. He felt along its frame until he located the communicator attached there. As he brought it over to where he and Laas waited, he willed a cavity to form in the center of their joined bodies, fitting it with a gaseous medium able to conduct sound. He activated the communicator with a touch and pulled it through his metaplasm into the cavity, where he caused a mouth to take shape. “This is Odo,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Founder, this is Weyoun,” came the immediate reply, his voice clearly sounding concerned. “I wanted to make certain that everything is all right. We just detected three Founders leaving the planet.”

  “Everything is not all right,” Odo said. “The changeling on this planet is no longer alive.”

  “We’ve just ascertained that as well,” Weyoun said. “And I think we know what happened to them.”

  “I assume it was the radiation from the nova,” Odo said.

  “Yes, it was,” Weyoun said, “but I think we know what caused the nova.”

  Odo sensed in Laas the same mixture of surprise and curiosity he felt himself. “Something caused the nova?” he asked. “Something other than natural forces.”

  “During our scans of the system,” Weyoun said, “we detected both warp signatures and the remnants of what appears to be the discharge of an isolytic subspace weapon of enormous power and range.”

  Odo had difficulty believing what he heard. “Are you saying that a weapon launched from a ship caused the star to go nova?”

  “That is what the evidence strongly suggests, Founder,” Weyoun responded.

  Laas seemed to consider this. Was this intentional? he asked Odo through their link, conveying to him the image of the lifeless shapeshifter.

  “Weyoun,” Odo said, recognizing that they needed an answer to Laas’s question. “We have to try to determine who might have done this.”

  “Founder, we’ve already matched the warp signatures with those that Vannis recorded at the moon of the Sen Ennis,” Weyoun said. “This was done by the Ascendants.”

  Odo felt himself tense. One of the reasons he’d gone in search of Opaka months ago had been to find out whether or not murmurs of her contact with an Ascendant had been true. And if she had experienced such an encounter, then he’d further wanted to determine whether the Ascendant’s presence near Dominion space had been an isolated incident, or whether it presaged confrontations to come. Now he apparently had his answer.

  “Weyoun,” Odo said, “transport us up.”

  “Right away,” Weyoun said. Odo closed the channel with another touch of a thin tendril to the communicator.

  What are we going to do? Laas wanted to know.

  We’re going to go home, Odo said. We’re going to go home, and hope that the rest of the Great Link can handle the truth.

  And if they can’t? Laas asked.

  They’re going to have to, because there’s no longer just a possibility that the Ascendants are coming, Odo said. They’re already here.

  The walls of the horizontal shaft sped from left to right past the open front end of the turbolift. Kira watched as the bulkheads rushed by, but her thoughts had already leaped ahead to her destination. She’d come here with Lieutenant Ro directly from DS9’s security office, where the two had been reviewing the latest communiqué from Gul Macet about possible leads in the matter of the Sidau massacre on Bajor, two months ago. They’d been interrupted by an alarm set off in the cabin belonging to Taran’atar. When he hadn’t responded to their comm messages, they’d queried the computer about his location, confirming his presence in his quarters. While Ro had called for a backup security team to meet them there, Kira had procured phasers for the two of them from a weapons locker. She had no idea what had caused a failure in an interior bulkhead, but her intuition told her that something bad had happened.

  Now, as the turbolift tracked through a crossover bridge toward the habitat ring, Ro said, “I don’t think I’ve been to Taran’atar’s quarters since we assigned them to him.”

  “Why would you?” Kira replied, glancing over at the security chief. “Until a few days ago, I don’t think he’d been to h
is quarters since we’d assigned them.” That might have been an exaggeration, but only slightly. Since he’d first arrived on Deep Space 9, Taran’atar had spent a significant amount of his time simply standing in ops and observing the actions of the crew. When not there, Kira knew, he could almost always be found training in a holosuite, battling anything from Capellan power cats to partial differential equations.

  Except all of that had changed three days ago, when he’d returned with her to the station from Ananke Alpha.

  The turbolift started to slow as it neared the habitat ring. The bulkheads stopped flying past as the car made the transition from its lateral motion to a descent. Soon the walls of a vertical shaft began moving by the front of the lift, alternating with doors as the car passed different decks.

  “Do you think the Founder said something to Taran’atar at the prison?” Ro asked. “Something that might explain the change in his routine?” Although not strictly a secret, few people knew of the Jem’Hadar’s visit to Ananke Alpha. But even though the event had taken place far from the station, Kira had thought it necessary to inform her security chief about it before the fact.

  “I don’t know,” Kira answered Ro, though she’d considered that very possibility herself. During the journey aboard Rio Grande back to DS9, Taran’atar had been even less communicative than on the trip to the prison. On the first day back at the station, Kira had noticed when he’d failed to appear in ops at any time during her shift. She’d simply assumed at that point that he’d been in one of the holosuites, running through one of his numerous combat simulations, but when he hadn’t shown up in ops the next day, she’d had the computer locate him for her. She’d been surprised to learn that he was in his quarters.

  Yesterday, Kira had grown concerned when Taran’atar again hadn’t appeared in ops and another check of the computer had revealed him still in his quarters. As Ro had just now, she’d wondered if, during his visit to the prison, he’d been affected in some way by something the Founder had said or done. Kira’s complicated assessment of Taran’atar over the past months made evaluating the current situation difficult. Although wary of his training and role as a soldier of the Dominion, she also trusted Odo’s judgment in sending the Jem’Hadar to DS9 in the first place, and Taran’atar himself had demonstrated his trustworthiness during his time here, following her orders as Odo had instructed him to do. But it occurred to her again that, at the prison, the Founder could have issued Taran’atar orders contrary to those he’d been given by Odo. If that had taken place, then Kira could not conclude with certainty what Taran’atar would do.

  The turbolift slowed once more, coming to a stop before a set of doors, which parted. Kira and Ro exited the lift and turned to the right, in the direction of Taran’atar’s quarters. “I’m trying to decide whether we should enter his cabin with phasers drawn,” Ro said. “When we were on Sindorin, we wor—”

  Ro stopped speaking in the middle of a word, a yelp escaping her mouth as though she’d had the air forced from her lungs. She flew backward, and Kira turned toward her in time to see the security chief land hard on her back, her head slamming into the deck. Her body immediately went limp, whether unconscious or dead, Kira could not tell.

  At the same time, the air shimmered between Ro and Kira, and Taran’atar suddenly stood in the corridor. Kira reached for the phaser at her hip, and had actually wrapped her fingers around it when she saw the object in Taran’atar’s hand. It appeared to be a weapon of some sort, though one she had never before seen. With a prong set off-center atop a handle, it looked peculiarly uneven.

  As Kira drew her phaser, Taran’atar raised his arm and snapped it forward. Kira lunged right, still bringing her own weapon up and trying to aim it. But then she felt the object flung by Taran’atar breach her flesh and drive itself deep into the center of her chest. She fired once, the shot going high and wide, missing its target by a sizeable margin. Her shoulder crashed into a bulkhead, but that sensation seemed like something experienced secondhand, overwhelmed by the pain radiating from her midsection and screaming through her body. Her phaser slipped from her grasp as she folded up and fell to the deck.

  Kira heard gasping sounds, and realized that they were coming from her. She looked down and saw the haft of Taran’atar’s weapon jutting from her body. A chest wound, she thought, jumbled visions of her days in the Bajoran Resistance floating through her mind. Difficult to survive without immediate medical attention, she thought. A quick death.

  The sound of the turbolift doors opening reached her, and she attempted to lift her head and look in that direction. As she did so, she saw splashes of crimson decorating the deck, and she understood that blood had gushed from her body. Odo, she thought wistfully as she rolled her eyes to one side and gazed toward the turbolift.

  “Runabout pad A,” she heard Taran’atar say.

  Kira peered at him, tried to look him in the eyes, but the effort proved too much for her. He’s leaving, she thought as she saw the air flicker about him. He vanished, shrouding again just before the doors to the turbolift closed. He’s leaving, Kira thought again. And so am I.

  Then she felt her own shroud accept her into its dark folds.

  Odo stood on the world of the Founders, alone on the islet. He and Laas and Indurane had returned here aboard Jem’Hadar Attack Vessel 971 several days ago, although he could not be certain of the precise span of time. He had been in and out of the Great Link with such frequency that he’d been unable to track the hours and days outside of it. Normally he would have been able to synchronize his internal clock with that aboard the Jem’Hadar vessel, but although he’d been in contact with Weyoun, he hadn’t gone up to the ship since he’d been back.

  Within the Link, Odo had found it more difficult than usual to monitor external time. Since Indurane had rejoined the Founders, seemingly all of them had been attempting to cope with the news he had delivered. He’d informed them of the discovery of the enormous Changeling—the Progenitor, according to him—and that It had succumbed to the effects of the nova. Indurane had also divulged that the available evidence suggested that the Ascendants had returned to this region of space, and that they had been responsible for the star’s going nova, and therefore for the death of the Progenitor.

  For Odo, the latter information—that the Ascendants now roamed near the Dominion, and had enough power to ignite a star into a nova—held greater import. Even if he believed in the existence of the Progenitor, and even if he allowed that they’d found Its corpse hanging in space, the consequences seemed too far distant to be of any urgency. Assuming the death of the Progenitor and the loss of any chance for the barren Founders to be given the ability to procreate, the Great Link would one day die out, a tragic end for his people, to be sure, but one far in the future.

  A zealous crusade through Dominion space by the Ascendants, though, could pose a significant and immediate threat, one that could endanger the continued existence of all changelings right now. But the Founders had almost completely ignored the news of the Ascendants, including the possibility that they had caused the death of the Progenitor. The same crushing levels of shock, horror, and grief that Odo had perceived in Indurane now pervaded the Great Link. In addition to Odo and Laas, a small number of other Founders seemed less distressed than the majority, but most appeared to suffer very deeply, unable to concentrate on anything but the death of their God and the loss of their anticipated salvation. Odo had trouble relating to his people with respect to this, but then he had not believed in the Progenitor, and awaited Its return, for millennia.

  Odo paced along the edge of the islet. In every direction, the Great Link failed to shine with its characteristic golden glow. Instead, the barely moving surface appeared dull, almost lifeless. The languid, matte aspect of the changeling sea reminded Odo of how his people had looked when they’d been infected during the war with the disease intended by Section 31 to eliminate their entire species. In one respect, the current situation verged on becoming as bad
as that; as horrible as the attempted genocide had been, the anguished Founders now appeared on the brink of mass suicide.

  Over the past days, Odo had slipped often into the Great Link. At first, he sought to engage all of his people about the return of the Ascendants, but found his voice drowned out by the terrible sorrow permeating the Link. Amid the choking snarl of stunned disbelief and agonized mourning, even Odo reached the cusp of descending into the bitter pain. At those times, when compelled to battle the encompassing sadness, he took flight and escaped to the islet. There, he stabilized his emotions and regrouped, then reimmersed himself in the changeling deep, where he would try once more to convince his people to reorganize their priorities.

  On the islet, Laas had occasionally joined him, but no other Founder had. Neither did any Vorta or Jem’Hadar appear, nor did Odo transport up to Attack Vessel 971, though he periodically contacted Weyoun. Odo had charged Weyoun with overseeing a Jem’Hadar task force, which would travel the Dominion and surrounding regions, seeking signs of the Ascendants. Odo did not desire another war, but he would not allow a race of religious zealots—he would not allow anybody—to attack his people or other members of the Dominion without launching an aggressive defense against them.

  A thought occurred to Odo, and he stopped walking. He turned toward the center of the islet, to where the small pile of ashes still sat. For all the emotion over the death of the Progenitor, for all the dread of a coming Founder extinction, Odo still felt sharply the pain of losing a single changeling—and perhaps especially the pain of losing one of the Hundred.

  Slowly, he stepped over to the patch of gray remains. He squatted down on his replica Bajoran haunches, then reached forward. He hesitated, halting his hand in midair, mindful of the numerous funerary customs he’d witnessed in the Alpha Quadrant. But this was not Deep Space 9 or Bajor, and this was not the cadaver of a humanoid.