7

Taran’atar sat at the forward console in Rio Grande, piloting the runabout toward Deep Space 9. Beyond the station resided the Anomaly, he knew, and at a distance beyond that, the Dominion. Looking down at his hands resting beside the controls, he considered how physically easy it would be for him to reprogram the navigational computer and set a course back to the place he’d spent most of his life—and where he might finally reclaim that life from the consistently baffling mission on which Odo had sent him.

But as much as he wanted to do that, he could not. Taran’atar could not disobey the will of a Founder, even if he did not understand or agree with the orders he’d been given. In retrospect, his visit to Ananke Alpha had been ill conceived. He could justify seeking the Founder’s guidance about his need to sleep, and he could even justify his pathetic desire to alleviate, if only briefly, her isolation. But he had also attempted to secure her permission—even her orders—for him to return to the Dominion. That hadn’t happened, and he now felt relieved that it hadn’t; had he succeeded in obtaining those orders, he would then have been forced to defy one Founder or another. As underutilized a soldier as he’d become in the Alpha Quadrant, he still did not wish to fail Odo.

In addition to all of that, the events that had transpired at the prison disturbed Taran’atar, and he knew that they would continue to do so. He could envision all too clearly his flight through the facility, putting the Founder at grave risk, dispatching the security officers, and then firing upon and killing Captain Kira. He felt no reservations about conceiving any of those actions, but it troubled him greatly to know that his body and mind had betrayed him further, delivering to him yet another new enemy, another new failing: dreams.

After his visit with the Founder in her cell, he’d returned without incident to Rio Grande, escorted by Matheson and Jenek, changing back into his black coverall on the way. While Kira had prepared for their return flight to Deep Space 9, and they’d awaited clearance from the prison personnel to depart, Taran’atar had sought refuge in the aft section of the runabout, wanting time to himself to consider the erratic behavior of the Founder. Unexpectedly, he’d fallen asleep.

He’d awoken confused, not only because of the initial moment of dislocation, but also because he’d quickly discovered memories of his own actions—the escape from Ananke Alpha, killing Kira—that he could not recall deciding to take, actions that he did not believe he would take. He’d also remembered impossible events; Jem’Hadar could not use their shrouding capabilities to project remote figures or disguise their appearance in anything but invisibility. On the heels of all those suspicious recollections came the contradictory images of his uneventful return through the prison to the runabout. He’d quickly risen and made his way to the forward section of Rio Grande, where he’d confirmed Kira’s presence at the main console.

“Are you all right?” she’d asked him. He’d realized that there must have been something in his appearance that reflected his discomfiture, and he’d immediately reset his posture, his facial expression, wanting to dispel Kira’s curiosity and preclude any additional questions.

“I am adequate,” he’d told her, again seeing in his mind the phaser beam slamming into her body and dropping her lifeless to the deck. “I wanted to tell you that if you wished to rest, I would pilot the ship back to Deep Space 9.”

Kira had demurred at first, but during the long flight, she had eventually grown fatigued. She’d retreated to the aft section to sleep, leaving Taran’atar alone at the main console. He sat there now, thinking again about the ease with which he could adjust the runabout’s course and take it through the Anomaly, and then on to Dominion space.

And what reason do I have—what reason could there possibly be—for violating the command of a Founder? Self-interest hardly constituted sufficient justification, nor could he think of anything that would. He considered the merits of informing Odo about the seemingly aberrant behavior of the imprisoned Founder, but felt even that cause inadequate motivation for him to act in contravention of Odo’s orders.

As he thought about his visit to the Founder in her cell, though, he also recalled her declaration that her people were not gods. Before he’d left her, he’d asked her to contradict what he thought she’d earlier said, believing—hoping—that the mistake had been his. “Founder,” he’d said, turning back to her. “You are a god to the Jem’Hadar, are you not?”

“I am not,” she’d said. “There is but one God: the Progenitor.”

He’d left, thinking her assertion just another manifestation of the strange manner in which she’d acted. But did not her odd conduct actually support her blasphemous claim? For gods did not go mad.

Taran’atar reviewed the readouts on the control panel, automatically confirming the runabout’s course, velocity, and nominal performance. Then he looked up and peered through a forward viewport. The panoply of stars recalled to him the sparkling lights the Founder had shapeshifted above him.

A tremendous sense of loss suddenly settled around Taran’atar, like water rising above his head, threatening to drown him. If his gods were not gods, then what did he have? And if they were, then had he not, by his attempt to circumvent Odo’s wishes, thrown away the trust and responsibility that a god had commended to him? In either case, the very meaning of his existence seemed lost to him.

Taran’atar felt himself moving through his life without direction, more so now than at any other time since he had arrived in the Alpha Quadrant. His hatred for Bajorans and humans and all the other species here burned hotly within him, almost like a beacon he could use to illuminate and guide the course of his rudderless life. He had never wanted to live among these weak, ridiculous beings, and he resented all that had happened to him during the past year—his independence from the white, his forced role as observer, his need to sleep, his mind’s conjuring dreams—all of which seemed to make him more like these species he abhorred.

Turning in his seat, he looked astern, as though he could peer through the bulkheads and espy Kira sleeping in the aft section. Whatever his regard for the captain, if his gods had abandoned him, or he them, he had no desire to continue following her orders. If he no longer had a relationship to the Founders, though, then neither could he return to the Dominion.

Perhaps I’ve lived too long, he thought. At nearly twenty-three years of age, he had outlasted every Jem’Hadar he’d ever known who’d been hatched before him. Although he could not be certain, he also thought that he might be the oldest Jem’Hadar who had ever lived. It occurred to him now that maybe a reason existed for that: maybe the Jem’Hadar brain had not been engineered to last much beyond two decades. Maybe he should be questioning not the godhood of the Founders, or his relationship to them, but his own sanity.

Taran’atar swung his chair back around to the console, and again checked the status of the runabout. Up ahead, unseen in its place in the Bajoran star system, hung Deep Space 9. Not knowing what else to do right now, he decided that he would return there with Kira.

But after that, he did not know what he would do.

Odo, in his Bajoran form, noted movement across the bridge of the Jem’Hadar vessel, and looked over in time to catch Weyoun glancing over his shoulder. Standing between Seventh Rotan’talag and another Jem’Hadar soldier, Weyoun immediately turned back to the console at which he worked, but not quickly enough to conceal the expression of anxiety on his face. Odo recognized the dismay of a Vorta failing a Founder—or in this case, half a dozen Founders.

Beside Odo, Laas and Indurane and the three other changelings stood in a circle, their roughly humanoid figures glowing orange-gold. The group had followed Odo to the bridge, where he’d overseen the investigation of space surrounding the nova. As time had passed without result, the five changelings had faced each other and joined hands, reforming their small link. The details of their humanoid forms had blurred, their bodies connected together via appendages that had earlier been arms.

Occasionally, Odo himself shapeshifted into their link. He wanted not only to update the Founders on the progress of their exploration of the region centered on the nova, but also to monitor their collective emotional state. The intensity of the group’s anticipation and excitement remained extremely high. Even Laas had grown enthusiastic about the search, although his level of expectation paled in comparison to that of the others.

Now, seeing Weyoun’s look of concern, Odo walked along the perimeter of the bridge, past numerous Jem’Hadar working at various stations. “Anything to report?” he asked as he stepped past Rotan’talag to stand behind Weyoun. Odo knew that there would be nothing to learn—if there had been, Weyoun already would have told him—but he asked the question in order to engage the Vorta in conversation.

“The radiation from the nova is interfering with some of our scans,” said Weyoun, not looking up from his console. He paused, and then added, “It might help us to have some idea of what it is we’re searching for.” His demeanor and tone admitted traces of both frustration and impertinence. The latter surprised Odo, but also pleased him. In the months since he’d begun having regular contact with this Weyoun, the ninth in the line of clones, the Vorta had shown few character traits besides the expected efficiency, loyalty, and servility encoded into his genes and historically demanded of his position. Even this small display of mild disrespect heartened Odo, signaling at least the possibility that Weyoun and his fellow Vorta could escape their longtime mindset as ingratiating servants to the Founders.

For his part, Weyoun seemed suddenly to realize how he had just addressed Odo, and he retreated from the remark. “What I mean to say is, given the circumstances, I’m finding this a difficult task to accomplish quickly,” he said, turning to face Odo. He wore a headset, but its small monitor had been swung up and away from his eye, deactivated. “I will endeavor to do better,” he finished.

“I’m sure your efforts are more than satisfactory,” Odo told him. Then, seeking to reassure him, he added, “In fact, I may have given you a task that will not yield any positive results.”

“Founder,” Weyoun began, and then peered left and right at the Jem’Hadar operating the adjoining consoles. “May I speak with you privately?” he asked, raising a hand and gesturing toward the center of the bridge.

Odo nodded once, and paced with Weyoun away from the Jem’Hadar. “What is it?” Odo asked once they’d stopped in the currently unoccupied middle of the bridge.

“I ask this only to aid me in my inspection of space around the nova, and because you made me privy to your research before we began this mission,” Weyoun said, obviously referring to the files he had collected and decrypted for Odo and Laas. “Are we looking for one of the Hundred?”

Odo considered disclosing the truth, but decided not to do so. He could not be certain how Weyoun would react—how any individual would react—at learning those he worshipped as gods actually believed in the divinity of Another. Such news might contribute to the empowerment of the Vorta, possibly even to their flight from servitude, but it also might result in less desirable consequences, including violent revolt. Until Odo could deliberate at greater length about revealing such information, and until the Founders had completed their quest for the Progenitor and dealt with the impact of their failure to locate It, he opted to keep the Founders’ goal for this mission from the ship’s crew. “We’re not looking for one of the Hundred,” he answered Weyoun honestly. “But you would be well served if you conducted your search as if we were.”

Weyoun cocked his head slightly to one side, a quizzical look appearing on his face. “Are you asking me to intentionally fail at the task you’ve assigned me, Founder?”

“No, I’m not,” Odo said, understanding Weyoun’s interpretation of what he’d just been told, that he should carry out his investigation by hunting for something—one of the Hundred—for which the Founders were not actually looking. “What I’m suggesting is that you direct your search by looking for changelings, but you should not expect to find any. The Founders here are—”

A pair of rapid, high-pitched electronic tones interrupted Odo. He peered over toward the source of the sounds, in the direction of the console at which Weyoun had just been working. Rotan’talag looked up from his own station and said, “Weyoun, I’ve found something.”

“What is it?” Weyoun asked, striding over to the Jem’Hadar seventh. Odo followed behind him.

“Sensor sweeps in the neighborhood of the nova have detected an unusual object,” Rotan’talag said, pointing to a diagram on his console that showed at its center the flaring white dwarf. “It is as massive as a planet.” He detailed its size and its distance from the brilliant star.

“As ‘massive’ as a planet?” Weyoun asked. “Is it not a planet?”

“It is not an intact planet,” Rotan’talag said, “though it may be the remnants of one. Its shape is that of a spherical cap, approximately twenty percent of the volume of what would have been the entire sphere.” Odo imagined a huge, solid dome hanging in space, the lone portion remaining of a planet that had been destroyed by some cataclysmic event—perhaps by the impact of the ejecta of the nearby nova. “But if it is the surviving section of a planet, it is not obviously so,” Rotan’talag continued. “Radiation in the immediate vicinity is interfering with sensors, and so I am able to scan only the surface of the object, but I detect no rock, mineral, or metallic substances there.”

“What do you detect?” Odo asked.

“Biomimetic cells,” Rotan’talag said.

As the implication of that information struck Odo, he saw Weyoun turn his head sharply toward him. He found the sudden movement accusatory. Only moments ago, he had told Weyoun that he should not expect to locate any changelings during the search, but to the Vorta, the veracity of that statement had obviously just been called into question. Wanting to maintain Weyoun’s trust in him, Odo made a note to discuss the matter with him later. Right now, though, he needed to understand exactly what Rotan’talag had discovered.

“Are there changelings down there?” he asked the Jem’Hadar seventh.

“From the available readings, I would conclude that the biomimetic cells belong to a single shapeshifter, possibly a very large one,” Rotan’talag said. “But I would also conclude that they do not belong to a Founder.”

“What?” Odo said before he could stop himself.

“Through a few random breaks in the radiation interference, I have been able to isolate DNA sequences in the scans, although just a few,” Rotan’talag explained. “The readings are consistent with shapeshifting abilities, but while the readings resemble those of a Founder, they do not match precisely.”

Odo gazed past Weyoun and Rotan’talag at the console screen, at the golden circle to which the Jem’Hadar had pointed, and that represented the unusual, dome-shaped object. Though surprised by the scans of a shapeshifter on its surface, Odo had been prepared to believe that they had coincidentally run across a Founder, perhaps even one of the Hundred. And maybe finding one of the Hundred here would not constitute happenstance, but merely the outcome of traveling near the Omarion Nebula, to which all of the cast-out Founders had been internally directed. But if the changeling on the vestiges of the decimated planet was not a Founder, then could it be—could it possibly be—the Progenitor?

Odo peered across the bridge to where Laas and Indurane and the others stood linked with each other. They had become further enmeshed, Odo saw, their bodies having drawn closer together, although they had not yet dissolved into an indistinguishable mass. He would have to tell them what Rotan’talag had found, and he already knew how they would react: with certain conviction that they had located their God, with keen anticipation that they would soon reunite with It, and with the joy that would come from knowing that their people would soon be saved from eventual extinction.

Despite his own disbelief, Odo felt his own excitement rise dramatically. He looked back to Weyoun, knowing what they would have to do next.

“Take us there,” he said.

In the deep of night, hell descended upon the city. It arrived in the guise of soldiers, squadrons of them, who appeared in the streets, in homes, on outlying farms and in nearby processing plants, bringing with them agony and death. They loosed their well-muscled bodies in hand-to-hand attacks, inflicting pain, breaking limbs, fracturing necks. The steel of their knives, honed to a lethal edge and wielded with merciless skill, sliced through flesh as easily as though through water. The electric-blue bolts of their energy weapons flared and found their targets, searing clothing and charring the skin beneath. Blood spilled, thick as the cries in the darkness.

Vannis preceded all of this by a matter of minutes. She stood in the large, quiet bedroom, the reflected light of this world’s moon stealing in through a casement and lending the surroundings a silvern cast. Remaining for a moment where the transporter had deposited her, she calmly surveyed her environs, alert for the unexpected. Though she squinted, her poor eyesight failed to allow her to make out much detail in the darkened room. Blockish shapes suggested furniture, and bulky hanging frames bordered what the inhabitants of this home no doubt considered art. A wide, flat screen set into the wall, along with a dimly illuminated control panel beside it, surely composed a computer or communications console.

A low sibilance, nearly a whistle, emanated from the far end of the room. Vannis studied the gentle sound for a moment, her keen audition verifying the slumbering presence of the two Rindamil who lived here. Unhurriedly, she started across the room, her shoes whispering quietly along the carpeted floor. Abreast of the wall monitor, she caught sight of her own reflection in it, blurred but recognizable enough. Even in the low light, her indigo eyes seemed to shine.

Moving past the monitor, Vannis stopped a meter or so from the raised, padded platform on which the two Rindamil slept. Before she spoke, she brought her hands together at her waist, preparing to activate the transporter recall affixed around one forearm. She likely would not need to employ its use, but she would sooner retreat than be captured or killed. Her transcorder implant, continuously recording her experiences and also uploading them to the Dominion subspace network, rendered her death, in some sense, impermanent. But she also knew from her previous demises—or more precisely, from those of her six predecessor clones—that dying carried with it anguish like no other. Whether the result of an accident, or murder, or even her own intentional use of her termination implant, the moments when life ended, leaving her to an incomprehensible nonexistence, had never failed to terrify her.

“Get up,” she said, her mellifluous voice filling the still room, and belying her anxious thoughts. Her finger brushed along the side of the recall control as she awaited reaction. On the sleeping surface, both Rindamil stirred. “I said, get up,” Vannis repeated, louder than before. This time, both of the aliens awoke, sitting up abruptly.

“What—?” asked the nearer of the two Rindamil. “Who—who’s there?” His bass voice sounded gravelly. Beside him, his mate reached quickly toward the wall. Vannis braced herself, preparing to flee an attack, but scans had already shown the room to be free of any weapons. An instant later, overhead lighting panels flickered on, obviously triggered by the second Rindamil. Pastel-colored linens sat in disarray about the couple, the golden, semirigid plates that covered their stout bodies visible from their waists upward. The two appeared shocked and somehow small, hardly presenting the air of command to be expected from the viceroy and vicereine of a planet. The male blinked, once, twice, a third time, green nictitating membranes arcing slowly across his outsized, dark eyes. He seemed to struggle to come fully awake, and to make sense of what he saw, but then the four sections of his blunt beak parted in an expression of obvious recognition. “You,” he said simply.

“Yes, me,” Vannis agreed, elongating both words, almost singing them. “I’m delighted that you remember me, Teelent. I, of course, remember you.” She watched for any indication that he might rush her, and saw none.

“Why wouldn’t you remember us?” yelped Teelent’s mate, Alsara, the dread in her voice plain. She jumped onto the floor on the other side of the sleeping platform, pulling a linen panel tightly about the lower half of her body. She stood about as tall as Vannis, not quite a meter and three-quarters, a full head shorter than Teelent. “You chose us. You came here uninvited and made demands of us, threatened us.”

“On the contrary,” Vannis said, injecting a note of offense into her tone, “when I first visited your world, I did so in order to welcome your people into the Dominion.” She raised her arms and spread them wide, a gesture intended to underscore her words.

“To ‘welcome’ us?” Alsara said. Her voice rose with each word. “We never asked—we never wanted—to be in your Dominion. We told you—”

“How?” Teelent said softly, the single word quieting his mate in midsentence. “How did you get in here?”

“Why, I simply beamed in,” Vannis said, knowing that the words, spoken truthfully, would have a chilling effect on the two Rindamil. Their society had developed technologically only to the point of visiting their world’s moon, but they had somehow managed to construct and use elementary transporters. They had also consequently determined how to thwart such devices.

Or so they had thought.

“You beamed in?” Alsara echoed.

“But we…” Teelent began, and hesitated. Vannis suspected that he worried about revealing too much about his people’s capabilities, but then he went on anyway. “We draped all of our cities in forcefields. And this very building. It should have been impossible for you to transport inside.”

“And yet here I am,” Vannis offered. She noted a change in Teelent’s bearing. He seemed to deflate, and she grew less concerned that he would try to attack her.

“Why have you come back here?” Alsara demanded, her voice rising in volume again. She rounded the foot of the sleeping surface.

“She’s here for our food,” Teelent said quietly.

“It has been a particularly harsh winter in the northern hemisphere of Overne III,” Vannis confirmed.

Alsara looked to her mate, then directly over at Vannis. “You can’t take our food,” she asserted.

“I’m afraid that I’m going to have to disagree about that,” Vannis said. “When I welcomed you into the Dominion, I informed you of the responsibilities attendant with your membership.”

“You can’t just—” Alsara began, but Teelent raised a hand, signaling her to be quiet.

“Based upon your threats,” he told Vannis, “we have done everything we could to increase food production. But crops are crops, and there’s only so much arable land, only so many people to work that land.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Vannis said. “I thought I was quite clear about what would be expected of your people.”

“Oh, you were,” Teelent said, the parts of his beak clicking together twice in what Vannis took to be the Rindamil version of a sardonic laugh. “We can provide you all of our emergency stores,” he continued. “They constitute—”

“No,” Alsara interrupted, turning toward her mate. “We can’t take that chance. Three of the last eight winters have been so severe that we’ve had to use our emergency stores.”

“I know,” Teelent responded, though he still looked at Vannis. “But what choice do we have?”

“No choice at all,” Vannis agreed.

“Our emergency stores measure twelve percent of our entire stockpile. It is a significant amount, one I’m sure that will assist you combating the famine on the other world.”

“I’m afraid that won’t provide enough assistance,” Vannis said. “As I already indicated, the northern winter on Overne III has been quite harsh. We’ll require seventy-five percent of your foodstuffs.”

“What!” Alsara shrieked, clearly staggered.

Teelent stepped forward, and Vannis reached for the controls around her forearm. But Teelent stopped after a single step. Rather than engaging the transporter recall, Vannis signaled the Jem’Hadar ship she commanded, currently in orbit about the planet. She needed to move this situation along.

“Seventy-five percent is excessively high,” Teelent said. “Much of our own population would be unable to survive our own winter. Perhaps if we ration our food, we can increase the amount we can safely give to the people of Overne III. Perhaps we can part with as much as twenty percent…perhaps even twenty-two.”

“I’m afraid you’re not understanding me,” Vannis said, although she knew that her voice contained no hint of sympathy. “The Dominion requires seventy-five percent of all food caches on the planet. Immediately.”

“No,” Alsara said again, but her voice had fallen to a mere whisper. Her eyes seemed no longer to focus.

“Yes,” Vannis said. As though on cue, the sound of weapons fire reached Vannis’s keenly tuned hearing. “This is not a request. We will take the stores we need.” She motioned toward the window across the room, and Teelent and Alsara hurried over to it. One of them gasped when they arrived there, although Vannis could not tell which one. “Your only choice in this matter,” Vannis said behind them, “is whether or not to cooperate. Jem’Hadar troops have transported down, not just here, but all over your world.”

As more and more Jem’Hadar weapons fire screamed through the night, Alsara turned back toward Vannis. “How can you do this? Without enough food, hundreds of thousands of our citizens, maybe millions, will die over the next few months.”

“If you choose not to cooperate,” Vannis said, “then that number will die in the next few days.”

For long moments, Alsara stared at Vannis, saying nothing, but obviously enraged. Behind her, Teelent continued to peer through the window at what Vannis knew to be Jem’Hadar soldiers giving his people no quarter. Finally, without turning, he said, “Take seventy-five percent of our food.”

This time, Alsara said nothing.

“Excellent,” Vannis said, and she touched another of the controls wrapped about her forearm. Shortly, she knew, her signal to her ship would be transmitted to all of the Jem’Hadar troops deployed on the planet. The attack would be halted, in favor of the collection of the Rindamil food needed for the Overne.

To Teelent and Alsara, she said, “Welcome to the Dominion.” Then she activated her transporter recall and returned to her ship.

On Deep Space 9, Taran’atar stalked across his cabin, executing a complex series of small but difficult tactical movements. Wielding a short, two-pronged weapon that he had just replicated, he imagined an adversary at the ready before him: a Merakordi paladin, tall and well muscled, clad in traditional armor, brandishing a cutlass in one gloved hand and a spiked flail in the other. Taran’atar took one long stride, two, and lunged forward, then feinted to the right, toward where he envisioned the Merakordi’s blade to be. He knew that his foe would be unable to bring the sword to bear at such close quarters, and would instead reach back with his other arm in order to swing the flail forward and down. As Taran’atar pictured the spiked metal ball arcing upward behind the paladin, he changed direction at speed, pitching his own weapon across more than a meter of open air, from his right hand to his left. In the same motion, he drove the weapon up beneath the bottom edge of the breastplate protecting his virtual opponent’s torso. Recalling with precision the two battles in which he’d fought on Merakord II, he easily summoned to mind the sensation of the twin prongs penetrating through soft flesh and into vital organs, delivering rapid death to this nonexistent enemy.

Taran’atar froze, his muscles still tensed, his body beginning to admit fatigue after hours of these illusory combat exercises. Since Odo had first sent him here, he had little utilized these quarters that Kira had assigned to him, spending the majority of his time either observing station residents and transients throughout the starbase or training in one of the holosuites. While he’d also served on several missions with Kira and her crew, he’d used this personal space for little more than the storage of weapons he’d crafted for his military preparations. But in the three days since he and Captain Kira had returned to Deep Space 9 after his visit to the Founder in the Ananke Alpha prison, he had not left these quarters even once.

I’m failing Odo, he thought, not for the first time. Taran’atar had essentially abdicated the mission to which he had been assigned, limiting his contact with the station’s inhabitants as much as possible, and thereby failing to continue the role of observer given him by Odo. He could change that, of course, simply by leaving this cabin and moving once more among Deep Space 9’s population. But he did not want to do that—he had never wanted to do that—and he knew that he no longer would. I’m failing Odo, he thought again, and understood that he had grown increasingly comfortable with that reality.

He suddenly became aware of his left hand trembling. Moving only his head, he peered at his fingers wrapped tightly about the haft of his weapon. A tremendous rage boiled within him, and without thinking, he pivoted on his right foot, whipping his left arm down and hurling the weapon across the room. It struck the bulkhead beside the door that opened into the corridor, metal clanging loudly against metal. One of the dual prongs snapped off, spinning upward until it hit the overhead. Both the weapon and the broken tine fell to the carpeted deck with dull noises.

Taran’atar crossed the room and examined the bulkhead beside the door. Where the weapon had collided with it, a gouge had been scratched into its surface. It left him feeling…unsatisfied.

Whirling around, Taran’atar surveyed the cabin. Looking past the furniture—a sofa and several chairs, a number of tables and shelves of different sizes—he once again conceived of enemies standing close at hand. He saw the Ferengi worm with whom he had to deal when using the holosuites; he saw the two men who’d run the child-care center when he visited there; he saw the other puny Ferengi who functioned as the station’s chief of operations; he saw the head of security, the chief medical officer, the executive officer. A multitude of people, Starfleet and civilian, surrounded him, standing with their backs against the bulkheads. He wondered if he might be dreaming again, and knew that not to be the case. He was not dreaming; he was furious.

Taran’atar shrouded and sprinted across the cabin, one hand sending a stuffed chair toppling over as he passed it. He ran directly at the genetically enhanced doctor, putting his shoulder down and throwing himself against the bulkhead. If Bashir had truly been there, his rib cage would have fractured and collapsed, crushing his heart in his chest. Taran’atar felt the bulkhead give, and when he stepped back, he saw that he had left a sizable dent in the hard, metal surface.

Spinning around again, he pictured the executive officer on the other side of the room, to his left. Again, he sped forward, this time kicking aside a low glass table as he crossed the center of the cabin. The table flew into the side of a companel and shattered, sending transparent shards flying in every direction. Almost all the way to his target, Taran’atar picked up a chair and raised it high above his head. As he reached the place he imagined Vaughn to be, he brought the piece of furniture down and thrust it against the bulkhead. In his mind, he saw Vaughn collapse to the deck, his midsection gored by a chair leg, his body ruined by the force of the impact.

Taran’atar continued his rampage. He visualized taking down Ro by splintering her neck, Nog by gutting his body, Quark by ripping off his limbs. His thoughts showed him Gavi and Joshua, the two men from the child-care facility, strangling beneath his grip, one man held in each of his clenching hands. He stormed back and forth across the room, battling the imaginary forms of the station’s residents.

Finally, he paused, feeling the places on his hands and forearms where he had scraped his hide during his exertions. He calmed his breathing, which had grown heavy and ragged, and attempted to slow his hearts, both of which now beat quickly within him. After several minutes, he recovered his strength, though he felt exhausted.

Turning in place, Taran’atar inspected his surroundings. The cabin stood in ruins. Almost none of the furniture had survived his onslaught. Chairs, tables, shelves, the sofa, all had been strewn about, demolished, crushed, pieces of each lying about like lifeless soldiers. Motes of glass covered the deck, and flickered here and there through the air, like falling snow catching sunlight as it fell.

And still his wrath had not been sated.

Taran’atar looked across the room again, and this time brought to the forefront of his thoughts the image of Captain Kira. He saw her standing where Bashir had, and he studied her closely. The notion came to his mind that of all those he’d met in the Alpha Quadrant, Kira alone had drawn his greatest respect. But as he scrutinized her unreal form, the readiness of her stance, the strength of her frame, the tension in her face—that face—whatever positive assessment he had made of Kira left him. A guttural roar escaped his throat, and he raced across the cabin, throwing himself feet first at his vision of the station’s commanding officer.

He could almost feel her midsection give way beneath his attack, her internal organs bursting as he pinned her against the bulkhead, her death instantaneous. As he toppled to the deck, his sense of victory tempered by the lack of his foes’ actual presence here, a loud report reached his ears, followed by a low-pitched alarm of some sort. He climbed to his feet, slivers of glass crunching beneath his weight.

Taran’atar examined the bulkhead where he had first struck Bashir, and where he’d just now slain Kira. The dent he’d made earlier had deepened, he saw, and several hairline cracks now emanated from it. He guessed that the alarm signaled the failure of the bulkhead, even though it had occurred in an internal structure, not in the hull, and therefore did not threaten the safety of the station. Ro’s voice emerged from the comm system a moment later, confirming his suspicion.

“Ro to Taran’atar,” she said. “We’re seeing an alarm down here originating in your quarters, a fracture in an internal bulkhead. Are you all right?”

Taran’atar looked to his right, to the companel situated just a few paces from him. He could see himself tapping its controls and responding to Ro, but he had no intention of doing that. Instead, he waited, motionless.

“Taran’atar,” came a second voice. “This is Kira. What’s going on down there?”

Still, he said nothing.

“Taran’atar,” Kira said again. “Please respond.”

This time, he did respond. He paced quickly over to the companel and drove his right hand into its display screen. The slick, reflective surface ruptured, the circuitry behind it sparking. He withdrew his hand, then raised both fists above his head and brought them down onto the panel’s controls. Again, the equipment could not withstand the power of his assault.

Taran’atar turned toward the door that led from these quarters and into the corridor. He had spent months failing to accomplish the task Odo had set him—a task he understood now that he should never have been given—and then over the past three days he’d tried to determine what actions he should next take. Now he found an answer.

As Laas and Indurane and the others stepped into the transporter alcove, Odo waited just outside of it. He watched Weyoun approach across the central section of the bridge. The Vorta carried in one hand a portable scanner, which Odo had requested prior to the six Founders beaming down to the planetary fragment, about which Jem’Hadar Attack Vessel 971 now circled. Despite their close proximity to the large, dome-shaped object, radiation continued to interfere with any but the coarsest scans made via ship’s sensors. Even with the lesser power and range of a portable scanner, Odo hoped that actually being on the surface would allow him to overcome the interference and execute meaningful sweeps.

Weyoun handed him the device. “I hope you find what it is you’re looking for,” he said. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, then moved to the control panel beside the alcove.

“Thank you, Weyoun,” Odo acknowledged before joining the other Founders on the transporter pad. He regarded his fellow changelings in their humanoid forms, and realized that even now he could sense from each of them—except for Laas—their profound anticipation. Since learning of the Progenitor from Indurane, Odo had come to believe It nothing more than a myth, and he’d worried about how his people would react once they’d discovered the truth. Now he wondered if they really would find the Progenitor on the planetary fragment below, and if they did, he wondered what would happen next. Would the Progenitor return to the Great Link and alleviate the Founders’ slow slide toward extinction, as Indurane and the others expected? And how could that possibly happen? Could—and would—the Progenitor somehow grant the changelings the ability to procreate, or would It somehow bestow upon them immortality? Nothing seemed likely to Odo, and from his own, admittedly limited perspective, he still found it terribly difficult, if not impossible, to envision any positive outcome to the events currently unfolding. He’d had similar feelings during some of the investigations he’d made as chief of security aboard DS9. Rarely had his instincts proved wrong, but he hoped that would be the case this time.

To the other Founders, Odo said, “Prepare yourselves.” Rotan’talag had pointed out to them the small gravitational force of the planetary fragment, and that its atmosphere had boiled off into space. Changelings could exist in such conditions, but needed to alter their physical composition accordingly. Odo himself made the necessary adjustments to his own makeup, then told Weyoun, “Begin transport.”

Weyoun operated the transporter controls, which emitted clicks and soft tones beneath his touch. A whine grew in the alcove, and Odo’s sight went dark. The hum of the transporter reached a climax, then drifted back down. Before Odo, his new location revealed itself as the materialization process completed.

In dim illumination, he stood on a vast, empty plain that stretched to the distant, curved horizon in shades of gray. Above, stars shined brightly, and patches of colored gases, doubtless ejected by the nova, spread like abstract artwork across the canvas of the ebon sky. The flaring star itself could not be seen, tucked out of sight somewhere beyond the edge of the partial world.

Odo looked around to make sure that the other changelings had materialized as expected. Already, Indurane and the three other Founders had come together. As Odo watched, they melted fully into each other, spilling downward into a shapeless mass and once more forming their small link. Laas stood apart from them, separate, an expression of curiosity on his imitation Varalan face. Other than the half dozen Founders, there appeared no indications of the presence of any other changelings.

As Laas started toward him, Odo lifted the scanner and peered at it, unable to see it clearly in the low light. He concentrated, shifting the composition of his eyes, adjusting the quantities and concentrations of rods and cones, until he could see the device through the night. Quickly, he worked its controls—the beeps and chirps of its operation absent in the missing atmosphere—and took readings of the immediate surroundings. He performed simple searches for movement and any objects visible on the surface—both of which provided negative results—then executed a scan for biomimetic substances.

The readout filled at once with information. He studied it for a moment, confused by what the scanner told him. According to the device, he currently stood atop a plain filled with changeling material.

Odo dropped the scanner to his side and looked all around, seeing nothing but the dull gray surface of this wounded world. Of course, a changeling could disguise itself as anything.

As Laas stepped up beside him, Odo bent and reached down toward the ground. He hesitated, leery of abruptly linking with an unknown shapeshifter—and perhaps even wary of finding himself connected to the Progenitor. But then he continued to move, pushing his hand downward. His fingers pushed through the surface, and Odo braced himself, prepared for the commingling of his thoughts and form with another.

Nothing happened.

Surprised, Odo closed his eyes and let his mind drift inward, into the spirals and circles of transformation. He wanted to reach out, and he did so, his fingers elongating and pushing forward through the insubstantial surface, attempting connections with whatever changeling life it encountered.

And still nothing happened.

He felt a touch at his side, and the distinctive pressure that came from a proffered link. Odo yielded at the point of contact, and then Laas was there with him. Odo, he called, and then offered the form of sand spilling downward, and the sensation of a fine mist landing on the body.

What? Odo thought, his mind reaching out to Laas, even as his fingers continued to reach out in search of changeling life here. Laas did not respond right away, and Odo’s hunt turned up nothing.

And then Laas repeated the form of the sand, the sensation of the mist. Odo stopped the expansion of his body along—through—the surface, then pulled his flexible cells back into his Bajoran shape. He lifted his hand from beneath the surface of this strange place, and as he did so, delicate granules slipped from atop it and streamed back down to the ground.

Except it was not the ground.

Odo lurched to his feet, awkwardly pulling away from Laas, breaking their link. He stumbled forward, dragging his feet, and looking down to see them kicking up clouds of ash. He felt like screaming out the idea that rose in his mind, but instead dropped to his knees and slammed his fists into the powdery surface. They penetrated up to his wrists, and then to his forearms, and then to his elbows. Again, he looked inward, directed his cells into whorls as they changed their configuration, their shape. Half a meter beneath the surface, his arms extended, just as his fingers earlier had. Down and down, he reached into this world he suddenly knew was not a world, not even a portion of a world. He opened his mouth and screamed into the night, any sound that would have emerged lost in the nonexistent air.

Laas staggered up beside him, and once more touched him, putting his hand on Odo’s shoulder, offering again to join with him. Odo peered up at him and saw a haggard, shocked look on his smooth face, an expression that seemed to mimic what Odo felt right now: realization, and awful sorrow. He could not imagine what Indurane and the others would feel when they made the discovery.

With the thought of the other Founders, Odo leaned his head to the side—arms and hands still buried in the ashes—and gazed over at the small link of the other four Founders. The entire mass quivered uncontrollably, and then portions of it reached upward, only to tumble back down. Even without being connected to his fellow changelings, Odo could feel their torment.

He felt pressure against his shoulder again, and he allowed Laas in. Odo, he called once more. But no words came after that, and he offered none, the shared silence a testament to all that existed around them.

Feeling small and lost, Odo gathered his body back into its normal Bajoran form, pulling the extensions of his arms back to their usual dimensions. Carefully, he withdrew his hands from beneath the surface, palms upward, sides pressed together, a cup filled with ashes. After a moment, Odo pulled his hands apart, and those gray grains sifted back down in silence.

He knew now that no planet had ever orbited here, torn to pieces when the star had gone nova. The ashes that stretched in all directions did not cover the rocky remnants of a destroyed world; they composed this spaceborne dome in its entirety. Here, all around and beneath Odo, lay the biomimetic cells of a single enormous changeling—perhaps even the Progenitor Itself.

But It was dead.

Terminus

Odo dropped the scanner, broke from Laas, and padded across the surface of this non-world, his feet kicking up the fine ashes of shapeshifter death. Laas followed, but Odo kept his eyes focused on Indurane. The three other changelings had parted from him, Odo saw, but the ancient Founder no longer moved at all. Then the others with whom he’d been linked departed, altering their forms in order to rise into the night. And still Indurane had remained motionless. Had Odo not sensed his profound anguish, he might have believed the old Founder as lifeless as the planet-sized corpse below them.

Odo stopped and turned to Laas, reaching for him. His hand touched Laas’s upper arm, and amid the golden glitter of shifting flesh, they linked again. In just seconds, their two bodies became one, an amorphous column of moving cells.

Dead, came the singular concept from Laas, the texture of his body turning momentarily to powder where it mingled beside Odo’s.

Dead, Odo confirmed, matching Laas’s shapeshifting for an instant. As he did so, a terrible feeling of loss overcame him. The idea of a Founder god had only recently been made known to Odo, an idea he had at first considered a possibility, before finally concluding it nothing more than a myth. Even now, present atop the enormous mass of a deceased changeling, he hesitated to believe that they had found the Progenitor, or that the Progenitor existed—or had existed—at all.

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 communique 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 his 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.

As though demonstrating the latter fact to himself, Odo leaned down and pushed his cupped hand through the fine-grained powder. He lifted his hand to eye level, the ashes spilling down on either side of his palm and between his fingers. The remains of the shapeshifter fell dutifully to the ground, the biomimetic cells unable any longer to alter form, unable to flout gravity.

As Odo’s hand emptied of the ashes, he saw something out beyond the edge of the islet. Far in the distance, a tall, narrow, funnel-shaped cloud reached from the dusky sky down to the Great Link. Odo stood up, his outstretched hand dropping to his side. Though he had never seen one in person, he had viewed recordings of cyclones sweeping across the lowland plains of Bajor, and thus realized the might of their destructive force. As he understood the phenomenon, though, the meteorological conditions required for its formation simply did not exist on this world.

But even as Odo thought this, another slender spire appeared, to the left of the first one, and much closer to the islet. It did not come into existence as he would have expected, though, and as he’d assumed the first one had. Rather than swirling down from the sky, it climbed up from the surface of the Great Link, like an enormous finger reaching for the heavens.

And then another formed. And another.

Odo turned in place. In every direction, the columns reached from sea to sky, with more sprouting up as he watched. He refused for a moment to accept the reality of the situation, even as it became clear to him that these were not cyclones.

These were Founders.

Above, the tips of the columns spread beyond their slim conic shape. Before long, they had flattened out into huge diaphanous planes. The effect put Odo in mind of Laas’s form when he had returned here with the three members of the Hundred, floating down through the atmosphere on great, delicate wings.

Now the wings grew until they blanketed the sky, and then the vertical shafts connecting them with the Great Link withdrew upward, into them. Odo intuitively recognized the actions of his people. Although veiled from his view, he knew that above the planes of changeling flesh, more shifts in shape, mass, and internal pressure occurred. As the Founders climbed higher, to where the thinness of the atmosphere could no longer sustain their flight, they would alter their bodies, within and without, and do what they needed to in order to escape the planet’s gravity.

To his left, Odo suddenly heard footsteps. So taken with the Founders’ ascents had he been that he had not heard any of them shapeshift up onto the islet. He turned now to see Indurane, as a Bajoran, walking toward him. The ancient changeling stopped just a couple of paces from him, and without preamble said, “We have no direction. We have no hope.”

“How can that be?” Odo asked him. “How can this be?” He gestured with both hands toward the rising masses of changelings all around them.

“For so long,” Indurane said, “we have awaited—we have sought—the return of the Progenitor. It took millennia for us to settle on the plan of sending out the Hundred, and centuries more to implement that plan. And it worked. In the end, it worked. We saw the sign implanted in us, and we knew that the Progenitor had returned.”

Odo saw in his mind the nova hanging in the sky, pictured himself plunging his arms deep into the massive changeling remains. He thought to ask Indurane how their people could be certain of the corpse’s identity, but decided not to pose the question. Odo knew that whatever justification Indurane provided, it would not suffice to convince him. Nor, he surmised, would anything he said be sufficient to dissuade Indurane from his viewpoint.

“But why this?” Odo tried again, waving his hands once more in the general direction of the Founders pushing upward into the sky.

“Because there is no hope,” Indurane said.

Indeed, Odo could sense from Indurane, and from all those around them, the bereavement of spirit of which the old changeling spoke. But he also perceived something else. “Do you feel guilty?” he asked. “Do many of the Founders?”

“I do,” Indurane admitted. “We do. For those ill served when we sent out the Hundred. Like you. Like Laas.” He raised an arm and pointed at Odo’s feet, at the pile of ashes there. “Like this one,” he said. “And like the Progenitor Itself.”

“Is that what you’re doing now?” Odo asked. “Dividing the Great Link and sending yourselves out into the universe that you believe is so hostile to shapeshifters, all as penance for what you did, as acts of contrition for your misdeeds?”

“We are guilty,” Indurane said. “We abandoned pieces of ourselves, and in so doing, lured the Progenitor to Its death.” He paused, and then with what seemed infinite sadness, he repeated the words with which he’d begun this conversation. “We have no direction. We have no hope.”

“If you want to be whole,” Odo said, “you make your own direction, your own hope.”

“We do not,” Indurane said flatly.

Odo considered what he might say to convince Indurane otherwise, but only ended up with more questions. “Are you relocating,” he asked, “or dispersing?”

“Some may remain together in small links,” Indurane said, “but most seek isolation, even from our own kind.”

“What will you do?” Odo asked.

Indurane appeared to think for a few moments, his smooth Bajoran features expressionless and unreadable. Finally, predictably, he said, “I have no direction.”

Before Odo could respond, Indurane’s body began to shimmer, beginning at his head and moving swiftly down through his torso, waist, and legs, and then on to his feet. Then his form shot up into the sky, a huge spire emanating from the islet. Odo craned his neck and peered upward, in time to see the top of Indurane’s new shape spread outward.

“Not everyone you encounter in the universe will be your enemy,” Odo said, knowing that Indurane could still perceive his words. But then the base of the column Indurane had formed retracted upward, and was quickly lost to sight. Odo called after him anyway. “We all make our own direction,” he said.

But Indurane was gone.

Odo watched for hours as column after column climbed into the sky and formed wings, which soon enough contracted and fled higher. Eventually, though, the number dwindled, and then at last, only a single column remained. When it too had gone, Odo lowered his eyes to look out at the barren world the Founders had once called home, and which they had now abandoned.

Stepping over to the edge of the islet—which, with the changeling sea now gone, could best be described as the top of a rocky hill—Odo gazed out over the cold, empty landscape. Where the Great Link once had been, he now saw only the uneven planet surface. In some places off in the distance, Odo could see the features of a changeling world, the objects and structures fashioned by the Founders for their own satisfaction in emulating. Various natural characteristics separated those places: rolling hills off to the left; rocky, craggy terrain ahead; and cratered plains to the right.

Not that long ago, Odo reflected, he had stood here, on this islet, his mind filled with hope. Now he looked up over his shoulder at the brightly shining orb of the nova, which had so recently drawn his attention in the same way that the Omarion Nebula once had. Back then, after his return here from his trip to Deep Space 9, he’d thought the nova a harbinger of a bright future for his people, an augury of peace and joy for the Founders in the days ahead.

Odo realized now that he’d been wrong on all counts.

As he contemplated his error, he heard the sound of shifting changeling flesh below him. Looking away from the nova and down into the empty lands surrounding the former islet, Odo spotted the orange-amber flicker of a Founder changing shape. It approached the islet, rising from below, and then splashed onto the ground beside Odo. It quickly drew up into a humanoid form, and then Laas stood there in his Varalan shape.

Just as Indurane had earlier, Laas began without prefacing his remarks in any way. “What are we going to do?” he asked, a look of astonishment and confusion on his unlined face. Odo imagined the same expression on his own face. But as surprised as he felt at the turn of events, he also recognized the dangers posed by the dissolution of the Great Link. To begin with, and perhaps most importantly, with its ruling force gone, the Dominion could easily descend into anarchy and chaos.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he answered Laas honestly.

“What’s going to happen to the Dominion?” Laas persisted.

I don’t know, Odo thought again, but then an answer rose in his mind. Attack Vessel 971 currently orbited the planet, and squadrons of similar starships patrolled vast areas of the surrounding space. Vorta and Jem’Hadar forces stretched throughout in impressive numbers, all controlled by the will of the Founders.

“What’s going to happen to the Dominion?” Odo repeated. “Laas, from this point on, you and I are the Dominion.”

A Note on Chronology

Readers of this miniseries will no doubt have noticed that the stories in Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were not presented chronologically. This was intentional. Just as the previously published Rising Son and The Left Hand of Destiny doubled back to earlier points in the timeline of Deep Space Nine fiction set after the TV series, so too does Worlds of DS9 shift back and forth as the series progresses, telling tales out of sequence in order to reveal events in a desired order. To borrow a phrase from a certain Emissary, the continuing saga of Deep Space Nine should not be considered linear.

However, for those interested in the chronological order of events in Worlds of DS9, here it is in Gregorian dates, using the final chapters of Unity as a benchmark.

September 29, 2376: Bajor joins the Federation.

October 1: Odo departs the Alpha Quadrant.

October 2: Jake Sisko sets out from his father’s home in Kendra Valley.

October 4: Fleet Admiral Akaar addresses the Federation Security Council.

October 8: Ezri Dax leads an away team on Minos Korva.

October 11-12: Dax and Julian Bashir on Trill.

October 14: Dax and Bashir return to Deep Space 9. Shortly thereafter, Bashir takes leave time and travels to Earth.

October 24: Sidau village on Bajor is destroyed; Bajoran Militia officer Major Cenn Desca assigned to Deep Space Nine; Commander Elias Vaughn turns 102.

October 25: Jake Sisko returns to Kendra province, married to Azeni Korena.

October 27: Bashir returns to Deep Space 9.

November 1-10: Ensign Thirishar ch’Thane, Ensign Prynn Tenmei and Commander Phillipa Matthias on Andor; Odo returns to the Dominion.

November 17-22: Quark, Lieutenant Nog and Lieutenant Ro Laren on Ferenginar; Bena, daughter of Grand Nagus Rom and Leeta, born on November 21.

December 2: On Cardassia, the True Way attempts to destabilize and discredit Alon Ghemor’s government.

December 16-27: U.S.S. Yolga travels to Ananke Alpha; Odo leads an investigation of a nova in the Gamma Quadrant.

December 31: Taran’atar attacks Kira; the Great Link dissolves.