Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Odo peered over again at Weyoun and Rotan’talag. The image of the female Vorta winked off of the monitor there, replaced an instant later by the green-and-purple symbol that represented the Dominion. Weyoun turned and addressed Rotan’talag, who looked up from the console he’d been working. As Odo watched them, he wondered if he would ever succeed in altering anyone’s perspectives here. Perhaps he had set himself impossible tasks: bringing tolerance and openness to the Great Link; setting the Vorta and Jem’Hadar onto different paths that would lead them away from their genetic encoding; reshaping the often brutal policies and actions of the Dominion into something benign. Even working from within, how could he realistically expect to foment such radical alterations in such well-defined and long-standing cultures?

  Still, even during the relatively short span he’d spent back among his people, change had occurred. Over time, the Founders’ concerns about Odo’s trips up to the Jem’Hadar vessel had abated. They remained unconvinced of the wisdom of his actions and intentions, but they at least stopped summarily dismissing what he did and thought. His people seemed now to take in what he tried to communicate to them, and perhaps even to consider the merits of his convictions. That marked a beginning, Odo thought, one upon which he hoped to build once he transported down to the planet and slipped back into the Great Link.

  And yet he also felt compelled to admit that, in some ways, the Founders had been right. Not about their resistance to peaceful relations with non-changelings, but about Odo’s daily scrutiny of Dominion security reports, about his regular contact with Weyoun and Rotan’talag. Whatever his asserted aims, Odo had found himself enjoying the routine, one not all that far removed from how he’d spent his days back on DS9. More than that, he had allowed his curiosity and his predilection for investigation to lead him away from his people.

  Nearly four months ago, Odo had set out in Attack Vessel 971 for the open port of Ee, so that he could explore rumors of a healer and theologue whose adherents supposedly included a number of Ennis. The descriptions of this religious figure and her followers had entwined with memories of stories that Nerys had related to him through the years, and had brought him to the possibility that the healer might somehow be Opaka Sulan, former kai of Bajor. However unlikely a prospect it might have been, Odo had needed to find out for sure.

  There had also been another reason he’d wanted to locate the healer: she’d purportedly had contact with a member of the Ascendants, a mysterious nomadic species long absent from the region of the galaxy now occupied by the Dominion. The Ascendants’ time in this part of space antedated the rise of the Founders’ empire, and few details remained of their society. Vague, sometimes contradictory accounts painted them as fanatically pious crusaders, merciless zealots who had ravaged entire worlds on a quest to join with their gods. The fossil records on several planets in the Gamma Quadrant revealed mass extinctions that had taken place around the time the Ascendants had allegedly swarmed through this area of space, but evidence of such catastrophes existed even in the other quadrants of the galaxy, and had been ascribed to numerous other causes. Still, if the Ascendants had not died out, and if the possibility of their return existed, Odo wanted to know about it.

  In truth, though, Odo had doubted that he would find evidence of either Opaka or the Ascendants. But the mere possibility, however remote, of reconnecting with some aspect of Nerys’s life had provided him with an irresistible motivation. In the end, he’d done just that—reconnected with her—in ways that he had never anticipated.

  Disguised as a Trelian, Odo had unexpectedly encountered Jake Sisko on Ee, and then they’d found the healer, who had indeed turned out to be Opaka. Together, the three had traveled with acquaintances of Jake’s to the Idran system—they’d been on hand for the shocking developments there—and then the trio had continued on to Deep Space 9. Odo had maintained the fiction of his Trelian identity during the parasite crisis on the station, ultimately making his true presence known when Nerys had needed assistance in combating the invaders.

  After the situation had been resolved, Odo had prepared to return immediately to the Great Link. Weyoun had shadowed him aboard Attack Vessel 971, waiting by the Gamma Quadrant terminus of the wormhole to ferry him back to the Dominion. But Odo’s first hours alone with Nerys had brought him a peace and happiness that he hadn’t known since he’d bid her farewell almost a year ago. He hadn’t realized until then just how much he’d missed her presence in his life. He’d allowed their time together to stretch into days, and then into weeks. He’d rationalized his sojourn in the Alpha Quadrant by accepting an invitation from First Minister Asarem to represent the Dominion at the ceremony in which Bajor would formally join the Federation. Even after the ceremony, though, he’d stayed a couple of days more, unwilling to part with Nerys just yet.

  While Odo would not have characterized his actions as clinging to the life he’d lived among solids, did such a distinction really matter? His people believed that he hadn’t yet given himself over to them completely, and though he denied that charge, he could not deny that he’d found reasons to leave them, if only temporarily. When Odo had first joined with the Great Link, it had fulfilled him in ways that he never could have imagined, and that he thought could never be surpassed. And yet if that were true, he had to ask himself, then how could he have left, and how could he have stayed away for so long?

  Movement caught Odo’s attention, pulling him from his thoughts. Weyoun marched toward him, a smile decorating his features, a smile different from the partially fearful countenance he’d worn earlier. His lips had parted, his squarish white teeth visible between them, the corners of his eyes wrinkling slightly. His eyepiece monitor still sat swung upward and away from his face.

  “Founder,” he said as he stopped before Odo. “I’ve received a report on the object from a Vorta aboard another vessel, and the seventh has now independently confirmed the information I was given.” He paused expectantly, looking up at Odo as though wanting encouragement or validation before continuing.

  “Go on,” Odo said simply, not wishing to buttress the Vorta’s insecurities.

  “The object is indeed a nova,” Weyoun said. “It became visible in the sky here just three days ago, increasing steadily in brightness during that time. But it is located at a far enough remove from the Founders’ world that it will not cause any danger to the Great Link.”

  Odo felt himself relax, the tension he’d been feeling dissolving away like ice under a hot sun. “Very good,” he said, relieved that his concerns had been misplaced. “How long before we’re in transporter range?”

  Weyoun raised his hand to his viewer and repositioned it in front of his eye. After a moment, he said, “Less than three minutes from now.”

  Odo nodded once and said, “I’d like to beam down as soon as possible.” He pulled off his headset and held it out toward Weyoun.

  “Of course,” the Vorta said, taking the headset. “It is always a pleasure to serve you.”

  Odo moved off to the right, a quarter of the way around the bridge, to where an alcove sat tucked into a bulkhead. He stepped inside, onto a transporter pad. Weyoun followed, and stood before a neighboring control panel. They waited in silence as the ship neared the Founders’ world.

  Finally, Weyoun announced, “We are within range.” He worked the transporter controls, which responded with clicks and muted tones. Before he finished, though, Odo stopped him with a question.

  “How far, Weyoun?” he asked. “How far away is the nova?”

  Weyoun reported the distance, and then added, “It lies just beyond the edge of the Omarion Nebula.”

  The information jolted Odo, as though a surge of electricity had passed through his body. “The Omarion Nebula?” he echoed, a note of wonder slipping into his voice as he pronounced the name of the place the Founders had formerly called home. Years ago, Odo had been drawn to the nebula when he’d first seen it, a response fixed in him—in all of the Hundred—by his people, so that h
e—and the others—would one day return to them. Now, faced with his original reaction to the nova, juxtaposed with the revelation of its location near the Omarion Nebula, Odo’s thoughts swirled as he attempted to make sense of it all.

  “Founder?” Weyoun said into the ensuing silence.

  “Yes,” Odo said absently, and then he looked up and gestured for Weyoun to continue working the panel. Seconds later, a hum rose in the alcove. Odo’s vision clouded for an instant, as though a draft of opaque smoke had wafted past his eyes. Then, just as quickly as the whirr of the transporter had escalated, it diminished.

  The Jem’Hadar ship had gone, replaced underfoot by a sea-girt islet. All around spread the brassy, swelling surface of the Great Link. Odo paced forward, then lifted his head and gazed into the dusky sky. Seeing nothing but the normal stars, he slowly turned in a circle where he stood, until just past the pair of peaked, ten-meter-high rock formations that ascended on one side of the islet, he spied the nova. It appeared larger than any of the other lights adorning the empyrean, and shined with an intensity far greater.

  Suddenly, Odo understood that he’d mistaken feelings of awe for those of concern. Now, something far more powerful replaced his ebbing fears: hope. The brilliant, flaring star captured his psyche in much the same way the Omarion Nebula once had. All at once, the nova seemed a harbinger of a bright future for his people, an augury of peace and joy for the Founders in the days ahead.

  Only later, when Odo stood here again, in the same spot, and stared out over the planet’s cold, empty landscape, would he recall this moment and realize how wrong he had been.

  1

  The strange beast descended on vast gossamer wings, coasting gracefully down through the atmosphere as though deciding whether or not to allow gravity to take hold of it. Its simple, relatively small body—no larger than a runabout—appeared little more than a cytoplasm-filled pouch. The primitive mass hung from the juncture of the membranous extremities, dwarfed by them as they blanketed the twilit sky with their filmy reach.

  Odo perceived the unfamiliar creature not by way of his own senses, but via those of the Great Link. He drifted through the changeling deep not unlike the way the unusual being floated through the air. Odo’s metamorphic body, protracted into countless planes and tendrils, many only a single cell through, stretched through the commingled volume of his people, a part of the whole. Connections formed and dissolved with contact and separation, passed from one to another, from one to many, from many to one. Fluid shapes arose sporadically in the living ocean like silhouettes in a lightless room, then slipped away, shadows uniting with the dark.

  Communication occurred among the changelings as both control and reflex. Discourse and dialogue took place, willfully directed, while the experience of form flowed involuntarily from one to another, a spontaneous response of tangency. Emotion and perception fell somewhere in between. Odo sensed the mammoth creature through his interface with other Founders. Those whose cells blended to fashion the surface of the Link conveyed their observations of the winged being as it glided downward through the sky.

  Odo withdrew into himself, away from the joining. He moved, fluttering the wisps of his body and propelling himself upward through the liquid assemblage of his people. As he did so, he felt their communal unease, which seemed now to grow. When Odo had returned to the Great Link a month ago, he’d been welcomed back eagerly, but in addition to that enthusiasm, he’d also distinguished an undercurrent of restiveness. He’d attributed it at first to his homecoming after having been away for so long, but as time had passed and the Founders’ anxiety hadn’t lessened, he’d eventually concluded that some other impulse drove their collective state of mind. He had just begun to explore what that might be when he’d become aware of the huge, diaphanous beast dropping toward the planet.

  A sliver of Odo’s body reached the upper limit of the Link and touched the air above it. His transitory form possessed no humanoid sensory organs at the moment, and so he did not see or hear, smell or taste. And yet he experienced sensation, comprehensive sensation, and with it, an awareness, a perception of the external universe.

  Odo regarded the skies, and now identified not just one bulbous projection depending from the center of the creature, but three. He also discerned that it had decreased overall in size; its quartet of wings, which had initially extended almost from horizon to horizon, now traversed less than half that area. As the creature dropped, the diminution continued, its aerial appendages rippling in patches as they contracted, the sheer, delicate flesh shimmering a metallic-golden color there. Abruptly, Odo recognized the being.

  Gathering his body, Odo set off through the Great Link, a finned, undulating missile traveling at speed. As he raced toward the two-peaked islet that rose out of the glistening changeling sea, he noted the mixture of anticipation and concern building higher in his people. But while he could understand their expectancy, and felt excited himself at the return of another Founder—and perhaps three other Founders—he felt disappointed and isolated that they had not divulged to him the original source of their disquiet.

  He slid swiftly along, images from those at the surface of the Link confirming what he’d foreseen: that the trajectory of the arriving changeling would bring it down onto the islet. As Odo approached the same location, he slowed and looked inward. In his mind, he called up visions of tides, rolling waters embodying motion, progressing inexorably through time and space. Within the tides, he summoned the circular movements of vortices, and within the vortices, their unseen but quantifiable derivatives: points without length or depth or breadth, measuring instantaneous rates of change.

  Odo began to alter as he visualized what he would become. He saw with precision the contours of the body he would inhabit, felt the exact limits of the physical frame he would take. The path to change had not always been like this for him, so clearly definable. For a long time, he had pictured a result he lacked the capability to fully assess. His cells would adjust and shift, but not as he’d wanted, not entirely, and in the end, his form would be left only a close approximation of his conception. But now, after months of guidance from his people, what he envisioned, he became.

  Odo’s body mutated, spinning into a contained whirlpool, swirling in upon itself, and upward, counter to gravity. He hurled himself free of the Great Link and into the open air, and then over, in that direction, toward the scrap of land, and down, onto the ragged rock. He felt the mercurial potential of his physical being, and strived to construct reality out of mere possibility.

  And so: the transformation, proprioception made conscious thought, surging through the process in reverse, from the fluxion of the dimensionless instant, through vortex upon vortex, wheeling in retrograde eddies, incorporating into the internal current, growing focused, and so: the transformation.

  He became the humanoid Odo.

  Standing on the small island, he looked skyward, just in time to see the returning changelings’ wings fold in on themselves in an iridescent rush. The three teardrop-shaped pouches, deprived of their means of flight, dropped the twenty or so meters onto the center of the islet. Each less than a quarter the size of a runabout now, their pliant bodies spread on the bottom as they landed, absorbing the impact. Odo expected all of them to morph immediately into other forms, but only the one in the center did so. It climbed upward, straightened and narrowed in a coruscation of orange-gold, then solidified into a humanoid figure with a broad chest and wide shoulders: Laas.

  “Welcome—” Odo started, and then hesitated. He’d been about to say “Welcome home,” but found himself choking back the second word. He nodded, and began again. “Welcome back,” he said.

  Laas paced forward until he stood directly in front of Odo, making no move to link with him. Though having proven adept at learning from the Great Link the practice of perfectly mimicking other life-forms, Laas still took on the approximate, somewhat unfinished appearance that he’d worn during his two centuries with the Varalans. When Odo
shapeshifted into humanoid form, as he just had, he did likewise, choosing to manifest not precisely as a Bajoran, but with the same smooth features he’d established during his years among them.

  “ ‘Welcome,’ ” Laas responded, practically spitting the word. His deep-set eyes narrowed beneath the fleshy ridges that ran across his brow. Odo, several centimeters shorter, peered up and studied his features: the slight, V-shaped bulge of his forehead; the pronounced cheekbones; the mouth curling downward at its edges; the flanges of skin connecting his nostrils to his face. He wore an expression of unmistakable anger. “I do not want to be welcomed,” he declared. “I want to know why the Hundred were sent out. I want to know why we were sent away.”

  Odo met Laas’s stare for a long moment, unimpressed by the vehemence with which he’d delivered his words. As chief of security aboard Deep Space 9, Odo had often been confronted with belligerence, and he’d always tended to react to it impassively. He did so now, stepping casually to the side and around Laas. “It’s good to see you as well,” he said.

  “I have no quarrel with you, Odo,” Laas said, turning toward him. “You are one of the Hundred. You are one of us.” He gestured past Odo, at the other two changelings. Laas, who’d had no knowledge of the Founders prior to meeting Odo in the Alpha Quadrant almost a year and a half ago, had joined the Great Link after the end of the war. The Founders had cured him of the slow-acting disease engineered by Section 31, but he’d stayed only a few months before leaving on a personal quest to locate more of the Hundred.

  “You know why we were sent out,” Odo said. “I told you about it when we first met.”