“It did take control,” Nog corrected absently as he double-checked his own equipment. He hadn’t been with Starfleet then, but he’d heard the story enough times from Chief O’Brien. “Captain Sisko almost had to destroy the ship.”
“Great,” said Bowers.
“But most of what it accomplished, it could do because people didn’t know at first that it was there. Ezri says we’re just going to return this one to the Dominion, since we’re not at war anymore. I don’t think it’ll have any reason to try and harm us.”
“Does it need a reason?”
Nog shrugged. “They don’t think they’re a lot like us, but I don’t know. They do think about their actions. Not like the Borg.” He and Bowers exchanged another look. Nog was pretty sure having a Borg drone on board would keep security up at night, too. It might keep him up.
“We’d better get a move on. Ready?”
“If that changeling is halfway across the planet by now, we’re sunk.”
“I don’t think it is,” said Bowers. “There’s nothing here to interest it. When we showed up it was just waiting in that wreck. It’s ready to leave.”
Probably since the day it got here, Nog thought.
“After two years it’s got to know the Dominion doesn’t know it’s here,” Bowers went on. “We’re its only way out. It may be scared, but it may also want to find us again even more than we want to find it.”
The nonessential equipment they had left behind did not appear to have been disturbed, and Nog packed it up regretfully. He hoped Bowers was right about the Founder sticking around, but he was afraid Bowers was wrong.
They were headed farther north when Bowers gestured frantically for quiet and Nog froze, then glanced down at his tricorder. Just on the edge of their sensor range was the Dominion ship. And inside, again, were the faint humanoid readings they had picked up when the first arrived.
Bowers had doubled back to where Nog stood and now hissed in his ear, “We’re going in, and this time, no noise!”
Nog nodded to show he understood.
They approached the ship from the south, under the engine pylon. Although Nog was now familiar with the interior of the ship, the act of returning felt even more surreal. The smell of decay and moss still pervaded the air, and Nog tried not to wrinkle his nose. His feet sloshed as he moved toward the source of the humanoid readings: the bridge. Try as he might, he had a difficult time picturing the Founder sitting calmly within the wreckage, surrounded by attending corpses.
Then he turned the corner and she was there, waiting, sitting on her haunches in a puddle of brackish water. She looked up at them, calmly, her face blank of expression. “I thought you left,” she said, in a voice that sounded as young as she looked. She seemed completely unaffected by the Jem’Hadar skeletons less than four meters away.
“No, we didn’t leave,” Bowers said. “We returned to our ship. But our vessel is still in orbit.”
Her face didn’t change. “Why?”
“We wanted to find you,” Nog said, finding his voice. She turned her attention to him but didn’t say anything. “To apologize,” he improvised. “We didn’t mean to hurt you before.” Ezri had been less than thrilled to discover they had hit the Founder with a phaser blast.
She regarded him carefully. “It didn’t hurt,” she said. “It surprised me. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Yes,” he said. “Another Founder showed us how to do it.”
At that the girl did react—she looked angry. “No Founder would show you how to do that,” she said. “You’re lying.”
Bowers was shooting him a warning glare, Don’t make her mad, but Nog had figured from the beginning that the only way to close the deal was to put Odo on the table. “Maybe not a Founder who grew up with you,” he said shrewdly. “But what about one of the Hundred who were sent out to live among solids? That’s who our friend Odo was.”
Now she looked suspicious as well as angry. “I know about Odo,” she said. “He rejected the link. He caused the death of another Founder. He was cast out.”
“No,” corrected Nog. “He went back to the link, after the Federation and the Dominion made peace.”
“There is no peace between the Federation and the Dominion,” she said.
“There is,” Bowers interrupted. “We even have a Jem’Hadar living among us in the Alpha Quadrant. He was sent to us by Odo.”
She considered this. “I understand that kind of peace,” she said. “You have Vorta, also, overseeing you, and many Jem’Hadar.”
“No—” Bowers started to say, but Nog quickly interrupted.
“I don’t understand what a Jem’Hadar is doing there myself, actually. If you come back with us, I’m sure Taran’atar will tell you all about it. You could even order him to accompany you home,” he added, ignoring Bowers’s incredulous stare. I win, everybody wins. Looked at in the right light, it was even, finally, putting one over on Constable Odo.
“Taran’atar. This is your First?” she asked.
“He’s First aboard our station,” Nog said.
“My First is dead,” the Founder said, and pointed at a body across the bridge. Her look turned almost melancholy. “I miss First.” Incredible to think anyone could actually miss a Jem’Hadar. At various points throughout the mission, Nog had found he missed everyone he knew on board the station—with one exception.
“I’m, uh, sorry for your loss,” Bowers said into the sudden silence.
“I miss Second, I miss Fourth…” As though aware of how that sounded, she stopped. “I do not miss Third,” she said decisively.
“Good riddance,” Nog agreed under his breath. Bowers elbowed him in the ribs.
“Do you have a name?” Bowers asked the girl.
“What use would I have for a name?” she replied. “I am but a drop in the ocean.”
“Aren’t we all?” Bowers muttered.
“Why did you come back?” the Founder asked.
“We came to invite you up to our ship. When we leave, we can take you with us.”
“To your quadrant.”
“For a short while, yes,” Bowers said. “From our station, we’ll send a message to the Dominion, let them know we found you. You’ll be able to go home. That is, if you want to.”
“Your station…where you have your Jem’Hadar.”
“Absolutely,” said Nog, who could see her waving goodbye from the platform already, Taran’atar packed and at her side. He tried to look so sincere that it hurt.
She regarded him carefully for a moment, then turned back to Bowers. “I was taught to believe that solids can never be trusted.” Before Bowers could respond, she added, “But I trusted my own kind to come for me, and here I have been these two years. I’m ready to leave this place. I accept your offer.”
* * *
Vaughn marched into science lab one and looked into the faces of the officers awaiting him. Their guest, the young changeling, was studying the corpse of a Borg drone stretched out on a lab table. “Report,” he said.
“Sir,” Shar began, “we’ve decrypted the data encoded into the neuroprocessor and have been able to verify the Valkyrie’ s mission to the Gamma Quadrant. Apparently since its assimilation seven years ago, the ship and its crew have been used by the Borg for reconnaissance, as a prelude to larger-scale incursions by the Borg if new species are detected and determined to be desirable for assimilation.
“Three years ago, during the Borg’s most recent incursion into Federation space, the Borg ship that attacked Earth apparently updated its Federation database from the ships it destroyed and transmitted that knowledge to the collective. Two items in particular that caught the collective’s attention were the Dominion and changelings. The Borg spent the next year erecting a transwarp conduit that would open into the Gamma Quadrant, and eventually deployed the Valkyrie as their advanced scout for the express purpose of finding a changeling and attempting its assimilation for the continued ‘perfection’ of the coll
ective. The encounter with the Jem’Hadar ship two years ago was the result, in which both ships were destroyed.”
“Do we know if the collective ever learned what happened to the Valkyrie?” Vaughn asked.
“We can’t be certain,” Bowers said. “But we know the Jem’Hadar managed to do considerable damage to the Valkyrie very early in the battle. As far as we can tell, the drones aboard were cut off from the collective almost immediately. It’s very possible that the Borg decided they weren’t prepared to deal with that much resistance. Or it may be that circumstances forced them to deprioritize the Gamma Quadrant—according to the Pathfinder database, the Valkyrie’ s mission to the Gamma Quadrant coincided with the Borg first contact with Species 8472.”
Vaughn nodded thoughtfully, recalling that the extradimensional alien civilization the Borg had encountered had very nearly destroyed the collective, and might have become an even worse scourge than the Borg had it not been for intervention of the U.S.S. Voyager. Small wonder that the Dominion became a lower priority to them. “Excellent work, gentlemen. We need to make this data available to the Dominion as well as Starfleet Command.”
“The Dominion, sir?” Bowers asked.
“Think about it, Sam,” Vaughn said. “Preparing the Dominion for the possible return of the Borg can only help us in the long run, and I can think of no better way to demonstrate our own peaceful intentions than by returning a marooned Founder to their keeping, along with the information you’ve obtained. This isn’t just a tactical opportunity, it’s a diplomatic one.”
“I hope Command agrees with you, sir.”
Vaughn smiled. “That makes two of us.”
A scream suddenly cut through the lab. Vaughn turned and almost refused to believe what he saw.
The Borg corpse had come to life. Assimilation tubules had launched themselves from its inanimate hands and into the nearby changeling, whose form was morphing wildly before his eyes.
Bowers drew his phaser, ready to fire.
“No,” Vaughn shouted. “Not yet.”
The child’s terrifying howls continued. Black streams of nanoprobes snaked through the Founder’s undulating mass of metaplasm. Pseudopods reached out blindly across the room as it convulsed in apparent agony, lashing out in every direction. The Defiant officers narrowly missed being struck by a pseudopod that smashed into the bulkhead behind them.
Then all at once the morphing mass contracted, straining violently to compress itself into a tight opaque sphere. It vibrated madly on the deck as it continued to shrink, becoming Borg-black as it condensed.
“Prepare to fire,” Vaughn said.
Suddenly the sphere morphed again, expanding and elongating into the changeling’s humanoid form. She seemed to be struggling to maintain her shape before finally stablizing.
Shar took out his tricorder and began scanning.
“Are you all right?” Vaughn asked.
The changeling nodded, flexing her hands.
“You resisted the assimilation,” Bowers said. “How?”
A third arm grew out of the center of the Founder’s narrow chest and opened its slender, symmetrical, two-thumbed hand. The arm lengthened until the hand was only inches away from Bowers’s face. In the center of its palm, Vaughn saw, was what looked like a black pebble.
“The nanoprobes?” Bowers guessed.
“They were trying to overwhelm me,” she said. “They were quite painful. They kept twisting me inside out. I knew I had to make them stop. So I did the only thing I could think of. I squeezed them together until they stopped.”
“Mr. ch’Thane,” Vaughn said. “Explain, please.”
Shar shook his head. “She’s fine. She really was able to withstand the assimilation.”
“How?” Bowers asked.
Shar continued studying his tricorder. “Borg nanoprobes are designed to assimilate life-forms on a cellular level. But a changeling’s morphogenic matrix has no cellular structure in its natural state. In essence, it was as if the nanoprobes were trying to assimilate a body of water.”
“More good news for the Dominion, I guess,” Bowers said. “And for us.”
“Wait a minute,” Vaughn said, peering at the Borg corpse across the room. “That drone is dead. How is it possible that the assimilation tubules are still functional?”
“The Borg are proving to be increasingly difficult to understand,” Shar said, “but apparently, even without a living humanoid to act as host for the technology, the Borg imperative to assimilate other life-forms can survive the death of a drone under certain circumstances, lying dormant until the right opportunity presents itself.”
“My God,” Bowers said, looking at Vaughn. “That means—”
“Prynn,” Vaughn said, drawing his phaser as he ran from the science lab. The medical bay was just down the corridor….
Vaughn’s phaser was up and aimed as he stormed into the room. But all was peaceful. Prynn was exactly as he left her, still at Ruriko’s side, softly reading to her mother from The Silmarillion, Ruriko’s favorite book. Ruriko herself seemed peaceful, even serene, her eyes almost tender as they regarded Prynn, never leaving her.
Tears began to form in Vaughn’s eyes. My family, he thought, unsure who he was addressing. This is my family. Isn’t this why I’m here?
Vaughn lowered his phaser. “Prynn,” he said.
His daughter paused from her reading and looked up. She saw the phaser in his hand and frowned. “Dad? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” Vaughn said. “But I need you to step away from your mother right now. We have to make sure everything’s all right. Please, Prynn. Move now.”
To her credit, Prynn didn’t argue. She put the book down and started to rise.
The tenderness abruptly fell from Ruriko’s eyes. She reached out to Prynn with her remaining hand.
Vaughn brought up his phaser and fired.
19
Lieutenant Commander Bhatnagar had returned to duty only two hours before. After a good night’s rest following her release from sickbay, she was anxious to figure out the cause of the overloaded EPS conduit. While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she’d come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it.
Bhatnagar stood over the master systems display table in the center of room and knew that something wasn’t right. Nothing in the diagnostics explained the buildup that led to the plasma overload. According to every instrument and situation monitor in engineering, everything had been fine. Yet something had caused the conduit to rupture, and in the absence of any evidence of a malfunction, or defects in the conduit itself, Bhatnagar knew only one other conclusion was reasonable: sabotage. Someone aboard the Gryphon had caused the explosion deliberately.
She was considering how precisely to tell the captain when a chime from the computer suddenly rang out. “Warning: Antimatter containment failing. Ejection system off-line. Warp core will breach in two minutes.”
What—?
Bhatnagar checked her monitors as all around her techs scrambled to do the same at stations throughout engineering. But nothing was amiss: Forcefields and injection systems in the warp core were at optimum, the core temparature was well inside the safe zone, and there was no indication of any anomalous energy fluctuations. Yet the computer had just announced imminent failure of the antimatter-containment fields.
“Montenegro to crew,” the first officer’s voice said over the comm system. “Report to the escape pods. All hands abandon ship. I repeat, abandon ship.”
Bhatnagar was beginning t
o believe chaos had finally gotten the upper hand. Nothing was making sense. A breach in progress where all was well, and now an order to evacuate the ship.
“Commander! What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!”
Bhatnagar ignored her assistant, Lieutenant Benitez, as she sought the cause of the computer’s warning.
“Warning. Antimatter containment now at 50 percent and dropping. Warp core breach in sixty seconds.”
“Savitri, we have to get out of here, now!”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Bhatnagar muttered, moving toward the towering column of the warp core itself. It pulsed normally, tranquilly. The ejection system really was off line, but…
Suddenly Benitez’s hand was around her wrist, yanking her away from the core. “Commander, we’ve been given the order to evacuate. We have to go!”
Bhatnagar allowed herself to be pulled away from the core, still unable to believe what was happening as she started to run to the escape pod.
Mello’s thumb tensed above the trigger. Her eyes never leaving Kira’s, she tapped her combadge. “Mello to bridge.” No response. “Bridge, this is the captain. Respond.”
“Captain,” Kira said, “you have to listen to me—”
“Shut up,” Mello said, backing toward her desk. Without changing her aim, she activated the companel. “Mello to bridge.”
“They can’t hear you, Captain,” Kira said. “Montenegro’s put your quarters under security quarantine. That means a forcefield over the door, signal jamming, and, I suspect, neutralized phasers.”
Mello tested her phaser on the door. Nothing happened. “Dammit,” she said, tossing the useless weapon aside. Xiang still lay unconscious on the floor. “All right, Colonel. Start explaining to me what the hell is going on.”
“Admiral Akaar sent me a message,” Kira began, and with exacting detail, proceeded to explain the truth about Shakaar and his assassination. “Montenegro must have anticipated that he was in danger of being exposed, because almost from the moment I came aboard, he tried to convince me that something wasn’t quite right with you. How you’d begun to distance yourself, how your personality had changed—all things that I’d seen in Shakaar the last few months. He even had evidence ready for us to discover that you were the one who’d faked the cloaking-device reading. He set me up, Captain, to get us both out of the way so he could take over the ship and carry out an attack against Trill.”
Lesser Evil Page 16
