“I’m going to exit the runabout,” Ro said.
“Acknowledged,” Blackmer said.
Ro strode to the airlock amidships and operated a control panel. The inner hatch glided open with a hum, and she stepped inside. When it had closed behind her, she depressurized the airlock and opened the outer hatch. She waited a moment, then checked the readouts that displayed on the inside of her helmet. “Except for the obvious differences, the hangar matches the configuration of those aboard Deep Space Nine,” Ro said. “I am exiting the runabout.”
Ro tentatively stepped one foot onto the deck of the hangar. She realized that she expected it to be malleable, perhaps even soft, a supposition that no doubt came from her observation of the shape-shifter readily sculpting itself into various forms. Instead, the footing was solid.
The captain stepped completely onto the deck. Ro paced away from Senha and then turned in place. The light from her helmet reflected off every surface at which she looked. But for the lack of color, the setting precisely resembled its counterparts on Deep Space 9.
Suddenly, directly in front of Ro, something on the deck stirred. The captain bent to take a closer look, but then realized that the deck itself moved. A patch began to rise in front of her, like a column draped in a silver cloth. As it climbed higher, it started to shimmer and twist, fashioning itself into another shape—a humanoid shape.
The form had reached a height taller than Ro, and a width broader, when it stopped rising. Its features sharpened from head to toe, like a view at a distance coming into focus. Although its flesh matched the silver hue of everything in sight, Ro nevertheless recognized the likeness.
The shape was in the form of Taran’atar.
* * *
As little as Ro had fathomed the entity’s replicating the form of Defiant, and then of Deep Space 9, she understood the Taran’atar-shape in front of her even less. It seemed to indicate that the shape-shifter must have come from the Gamma Quadrant, from the Dominion, and that it must have knowledge not only of Taran’atar, but of Ro’s association with him. For that matter, the entity must know who I am. That lent credence to her belief that the shape-shifter had changed course toward DS9 when she had identified herself.
“Captain, is that a Jem’Hadar?” Blackmer asked.
“I need to concentrate,” Ro said quietly. She slowly reached up to her helmet and muted the transmissions from the starbase, though the crew would still be able to monitor her open channel. Zhang would see on her communications console what the captain had done, and she would report the action to Blackmer.
Before Ro could identify herself or ask a question of the figure standing before her, it spoke. “Ro Laren,” it said, the words reaching her not through the external sensors on her helmet, but through her environmental suit and its connection to the deck.
“I am Captain Ro Laren,” she said, assuming that the sound of her voice would likewise translate through the deck to the entity. “I am the commanding officer of Deep Space Nine, the starbase that you have copied.”
“This is not the Deep Space Nine familiar to me,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “But the records we scanned indicate that the former Cardassian ore-processing facility was destroyed some time ago.”
“ ‘We’?” Ro said.
“There are many of us here,” the Taran’atar-shape said.
“How many?”
“Thousands.” He paused, then added, “Some of those here are no more, but their remains are still present.”
“Who are you?”
“You know me. I am Taran’atar.”
“No, you’re not,” Ro said. Though she knew the claim for a falsehood, it still angered her. “Taran’atar died in this star system.”
“You thought that I died,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “Aboard a ship called the Even Odds.”
It seemed to Ro that the entity intended its statement as proof of its identity, but that didn’t follow. “You already told me that you scanned Deep Space Nine’s memory banks,” Ro said. “The information about how Taran’atar died is stored there.”
“It is,” the Taran’atar-shape agreed. “I had hoped initially to speak with Captain Kira Nerys, but I saw in the records aboard the Defiant that she left Deep Space Nine, and that she was eventually lost.”
“Yes,” Ro agreed. “She died in the collapse of the wormhole more than two years ago.”
“That is unfortunate,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “Although . . . it is perhaps intriguing as well.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Ro said. “You are in the form of Taran’atar, but I would like to know your true identity . . . who you are, who your people are. Why have you come here? I would like to open a dialogue with you. My people are curious about all life-forms, and we seek peaceful coexistence with them.”
The shape stepped toward Ro, its legs attached by waves of silvery material to the deck. It gazed down at her and closed its eyes, as if in concentration. Ro did not feel threatened, but neither did she know what the entity intended to do.
The light flickered. No, not the light. Everything around Ro blinked, changed for a fraction of a second from a wholly metallic version of a hangar bay to a more genuine one. A light blinked on and then off, and then the one-colored compartment returned.
It lasted only an instant. Color reappeared—not bright, vibrant colors, but the muted tones of an actual hangar bay. It faded quickly, but then snapped back to a realistic echo of the same space aboard the real Deep Space 9.
Though branches of silver still connected him to the deck, the Taran’atar-shape looked genuine, too. It had a coarse gray-green hide. Bony, teeth-like protrusions lined its jaw and climbed up the back sides of its head. It had dark, deep-set eyes.
“I am Taran’atar,” it repeated.
“I know that you’re not,” Ro said again. “Please stop saying that. Taran’atar was my friend.”
“I know,” the entity said. “It was eight of your years ago, though I could not have told you that before gaining access to your records. Since then, time had lost meaning to us. Or perhaps we had been lost to time.”
Ro shook her head. “I do not know what you are talking about,” she said. “You sound as though you are intentionally speaking in ways meant to confuse, rather than enlighten.”
The Taran’atar-shape glanced away, not at some point in the hangar bay, but as though looking inward. “Yes,” it said. “It has been that long—eight of your years—since I used words in this way. But I will seek to be clear: I am Taran’atar.”
Ro chose not to contradict the entity that time. I may as well let it have its say. She might not learn its identity or what it truly wanted, but she might at least learn how and why it wanted to represent its identity and its needs.
“I left Deep Space Nine almost nine of your years ago,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “Captain Kira and Commander Vaughn led the effort to recover me from an alternate universe, and from the control of Iliana Ghemor. The captain gave me the choice of remaining on the station, or leaving on an old Bajoran scoutship. I left, not to claim the freedom Kira Nerys offered to me, but to seek the judgment of the Founders for my failures.
“I took the scoutship and traveled through the Anomaly,” the Taran’atar-shape continued. “On my way to the Dominion, I intercepted a distress call from the crew of the Even Odds. Seeing a means of fulfilling my role as a soldier, I responded. Afterward, once I had saved the Even Odds crew, I set myself a new purpose, and I stayed aboard to provide them security.”
Ro knew the beginning of the story—the capture and control of Taran’atar by Iliana Ghemor, and the DS9 crew’s attempt to rescue him—but she knew nothing about the Jem’Hadar’s life between his decision to depart the station and his arrival back in the system almost a year later, aboard Even Odds. What the Taran’atar-shape told her could all be fantasy, a tale designed to produce some response in her, but she wanted to hear the rest of it.
“Eventually, the Even
Odds traveled to Idran Four,” the Taran’atar-shape went on. “There, we discovered a fleet of Ascendant vessels massed near the entrance to the Anomaly. I learned that they were being led by Iliana Ghemor, and that she had a subspace weapon with which she intended to destroy Bajor.”
Again, the Taran’atar-shape listed details that had become a matter of record. Ro knew that the best way to lie was to tell as much truth as possible. Still, she discovered that she wanted to believe all of what she heard.
“I protected the city on Idran Four from an attack by a small force of Ascendants,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “When they moved to rejoin their fleet, I stranded the Even Odds crew on the planet and went in pursuit of Ghemor. On my way to Bajor, I spoke with Captain Kira. I explained the situation to her, and when I saw the Ascendant ships massing to attack, I tore open a subspace irregularity.”
“A what?” Ro asked. She remembered well the explosion that had consumed Even Odds and sent subspace waves rippling through the Ascendant fleet.
“An irregularity . . . an incongruence in subspace,” the Taran’atar-shape said. “I cannot describe the abnormality more completely or more accurately than that. I studied it enough to conclude that it was a threshold between points in space-time. That threshold might have linked the normal continuum with subspace, or it might itself have been a part of subspace. I didn’t know, and I still don’t. But I had determined that if I increased its level of energy, it would give way.”
“You fired an energy weapon,” Ro said, recalling Kira’s account of her last contact with Taran’atar.
“Yes. And the threshold failed, releasing a barrage of subspace waves, as I’d anticipated.”
“Waves that triggered Ghemor’s subspace weapon,” Ro said.
“But, as I have come to learn, it was not just a subspace weapon.”
“It was an isolytic subspace weapon,” Ro said.
“It was not just an isolytic subspace weapon. It had been augmented by one of the Ascendants with a transformative fuel.”
“What . . . what does that mean?” Ro asked.
He told her.
Interlude
Nova
On the Quest
In a distant patch of space, Aniq piloted her bladelike vessel toward the rapidly fading star. She skirted a vast expanse of dust and ionized gases that colored the void mostly in shades of violet and blue. The shape-shifters who called themselves the Founders—who had, in fact, founded the Dominion—had until recently called a planet in the nebula home. Aniq had hoped to be a part of the force that eradicated them from the universe, but before that could happen, the Changelings had abandoned their world for another, in an as yet unknown location.
Teniq waited too long, Aniq thought. She had never uttered that statement aloud, for fear of risking the label of impudence, and the penance that would come along with it. A young knight who had not lived even a full century could not speak out against the Archquester to whom she reported without provoking consequences.
And yet it remained the case that a more timely attack on the Founders could have vanquished their particular breed of sinner. Unlike those who dared to falsely worship the True, or those who deified beings other than the actual gods, the Founders had constructed an empire in which they inculcated in their subjects—and sometimes bred into them—the belief in the divinity of the shape-shifters themselves. Such arrogant sacrilege seemed almost unimaginable to Aniq, and it could be met with only one response: extermination.
Aniq eyed the nebula as she passed it to port. She hoped that she would eventually get the opportunity to rid the universe of the Founders and the filth they propagated. She believed that she would, because such an accomplishment would be worthy of the End Time, and recently, she had heard tell of other knights reporting foretokens of the Path to the Final Ascension.
Aniq had never doubted that she would one day enter the Fortress of the True, that she would stand before the Unnameable and burn beneath their gaze, that she would be found worthy and allowed to join with her gods. She knew that some who had endured the Quest for centuries considered her self-centered belief the egotism of youth. All knights knew that their people would one day reach the Fortress and achieve the Final Ascension, but many accepted as likely that it would not occur within their own lifetime, but during some future generation. Aniq believed otherwise, and she took every opportunity to make her beliefs reality.
To that end, the young Quester had pursued a great, changeable being—not one of the Founders, as best she could tell, but a shape-shifter of considerable size and age. She first encountered the vast creature cycles earlier, in a confrontation that destroyed Aniq’s ship and left her stranded on a primitive world. Two older Ascendants in her Order rescued her and provided her with a new vessel. They also counseled her to allow the experience to teach her a modicum of humility and caution when it came to the performance of her duties.
Aniq had accepted the proffered guidance meekly, but with no intention of necessarily heeding it. When she later seized a trophy from a civilization of heretics that she destroyed, a plan began to form in her mind. She viewed the subspace weapon she had taken as her personal tribute to the True, as well as a tool to aid her—and her fellow Ascendants—in burning before them. And in the enormous shape-shifter, she suddenly perceived a means of facilitating her—and the Ascendants—joining with their gods.
Aniq had searched out the massive, variable being. When she found it, she tracked it. Over time, she learned its patterns of behavior, which included occasionally going to ground by settling into a star system, emulating a piece of planetary flotsam, and hibernating.
During one such period of dormancy, when the shape-shifter had dropped into orbit about a white dwarf—one star of two in a binary system—Aniq had recognized her opportunity. Utilizing a technology appropriated from another race of blasphemers the Ascendants had long before annihilated, she accelerated the accretion of hydrogen by the white dwarf from its companion star. A runaway fusion reaction ensued. The white dwarf went nova.
Aniq had withdrawn to a safe distance as the star began to brighten. It ejected material from its surface and emitted massive amounts of radiation. From her observations of the great shape-shifter, Aniq calculated that it would not have enough time to awaken from its slumber before the effects of the nova reached it.
Since then, Aniq had resumed her life on the Quest: searching for the Fortress of the True, seeking out heretics and making them pay for their profanation, looking for omens that the End Time approached. But while other Ascendants contented themselves with merely being receptive to auguries of what they had for so long sought, Aniq would work to make them come to pass.
Aniq had kept a dedicated scan locked on the nova she had hastened. When its effects receded enough for her to inspect what she had wrought, she set course for the white dwarf. It pleased her to think that she had neutralized a creature that had acted against the Ascendants—that had almost killed her—but it inspired her to imagine collecting its resources for her own ends.
Past the nebula that had previously sheltered the Founders, the white dwarf still blazed more brightly than when Aniq had first visited the system, but far from the peak radiance of the nova. Long-range sensors confirmed that the current conditions would allow safe entry into the system. Aniq continued on her course at superluminal velocity, waiting for the immense shape-shifter to appear on her scans.
At last, it did. It read as a static, dome-shaped object orbiting the white dwarf. Aniq saw no movement, and no signs of life.
At the edge of the system, Aniq dropped her vessel to its maximum sublight speed and set course for the remains of the shape-shifter. She rendered the canopy of her ship transparent so that she could see it as she neared. More than once, she glanced aft, at the missile she towed behind her vessel.
As her ship drew closer, Aniq took care to ensure that the shape-shifter had been rendered lifeless. Once she had, she charted an orbit around it. She
sampled radiation measurements from its surface, eventually locating the least irradiated area just where she expected it: in the center of its dark side. Choosing that as her destination, Aniq took her vessel down into the shadows. Her ship landed softly, the pull of gravity real but weak on the sizable mass.
After activating her ship’s external lighting, Aniq donned an environmental suit. She then sealed the cabin off from the rest of her ship and purged it of atmosphere. Reaching her gloved hand into the hatch release, she took hold of the handle, pulled it toward her, and twisted it. The canopy of her vessel rotated upward.
Aniq hauled herself out of the cockpit and used two lines of indentations in the hull to climb down the side of her ship. The external lighting banished the darkness for several times the length of her vessel, in all directions. When she stepped onto the shape-shifter, wisps of fine, dry material puffed up all around her boots. She watched as the tiny clouds settled slowly back down. After they had, she kicked at the surface. An arid spray of the shape-shifter’s remains arced upward. It took a long time to drift back down.
The moment felt like victory to Aniq. It also seemed inevitable. She had always known that she would reach the Fortress of the True, and now she knew why. When the Ascendants burned, she would provide the means by which they joined with the Unnameable.
Aniq strode along the flank of her vessel and then past it, to the missile towed there. Fitted with antigravs, it floated above the surface, double the length of Aniq’s ship. She beheld its long, narrow form and the bold whiteness of its casing, as well as her modifications to the weapon. A tubular black ring encircled the projectile near its nose cone, while a second girded it at its midpoint. A trio of long conduits, also black, connected the two rings.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance Page 28