As Vannis neared the hillside, a sound reached her sensitive ears from somewhere up ahead. It could have been a minor rockfall, but she also knew from ship’s sensors both that the moon’s small population resided nearby, and that a system of caves snaked through the hills. She continued her scans, but kept alert for additional sounds.
A few moments later, Vannis heard more noises, including a shuffling that might have been footsteps. She also detected a slight echo, suggesting a presence in one of the caves. Without altering her gait or posture, she reset the scanner to search for life signs. The device distinguished a single humanoid, just inside the mouth of the nearest cave. The individual appeared relatively small in stature, and carried no weapons of any kind.
Vannis considered calling back one of the Jem’Hadar, but didn’t feel the need. Instead, she gradually altered her path toward the hills, until she ended up close to the cave entrance. Without looking in that direction, she said, “Hello there.”
No response came, but neither did Vannis hear the individual fleeing. “Yes, I’m speaking to you,” she said, and then she turned slowly toward the cave mouth, until she faced it from just a few meters away. “You, in the cave.”
Vannis waited. If this was one of the local populace, she wanted to interrogate them about anything they might know regarding the crash or emergency landing of the Ascendant’s ship. Just when she thought she might have to take different actions to accomplish this, she heard the shuffling sound again, and then somebody emerged from the cave.
The child, a young man, raised a hand before his face, obviously shielding his eyes from the morning sunlight shining in his direction. A patina of grime covered the swarthy skin of his hands and face, as though his travels had kicked up soil from the floors of the caves and deposited on him the resultant dust. Even through the layer of dirt, though, Vannis could see what appeared to be scars on his face, pale streaks slashed about his features. “Hello,” he said excitedly, squinting in the bright dawn. “I was just playing and I saw you.” Despite the remnants of injuries sustained, the boy behaved with a childlike bearing.
“I know,” Vannis said. “What’s your name?”
“Mine’s Misja,” the boy said. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Vannis.” She paused, then asked, “Do you live here?”
“In the village, yes,” he said. “With my tribe.”
“The Sen Ennis,” Vannis ventured, sure of the fact, but wanting to verify it anyway.
“Ye-es,” the boy said hesitantly.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Vannis told him. “I’m not here to hurt you or your tribe.”
“Why are you here?” Misja asked, as Vannis had easily maneuvered him to do.
“I’m here to find a friend of mine,” she said. “Quite tall, and silvery.” Vannis had gotten a description of the Ascendants from Dominion historical files.
“Raiq,” the boy said eagerly.
“Yes, Raiq,” Vannis said, guessing that to be the name of the Ascendant. “Is Raiq here?” she asked, knowing from the Founder that the Ascendant had already departed.
“No, she left a while ago, right after she healed,” Misja said.
“Healed?” Vannis asked, feigning concern. “Was she injured?”
“She wasn’t well, but Tadia and Sulan didn’t know whether she was sick or got hurt when her ship crashed,” Misja said.
“Her ship crashed? Oh no.” Vannis asked. “Is it still here?”
“No,” Misja said. “I guess it wasn’t too badly damaged when she crashed.” Then he pointed down along the hills, and provided Vannis the information she’d been hoping to glean from him. “She landed right over there. I saw it, and I told everybody about it.”
“Would you show me?” she asked.
“Sure,” Misja said, and he led her along the hillside. When finally he stopped, he said, “Right here,” and pointed down at the ground. Vannis walked around him, peering downward, but she saw nothing to indicate that a ship might have even landed here, let alone crashed here. She bent down and surveyed the ground from that angle, and noticed only a slight depression in one spot, and several long, thin indentations in a couple of other places. If a ship had been responsible for these, its footprint must have been quite narrow, almost bladelike.
She was not convinced.
“Would you mind if I took some readings?” Vannis asked, standing back up. “I just want to make sure this was my friend’s ship.”
Misja shrugged. “Sure,” he said.
Vannis operated the scanner. To her surprise, the boy’s claims appeared to be accurate. She read a warp signature in the area, and while the Ascendant likely would not have utilized such propulsion to land or launch on the moon, the readings might indicate an active warp drive that simply hadn’t been taken offline before the crash. She also discovered small pieces of refined metal buried all about, just below the surface.
To Misja, she said, “Yes, this is Raiq’s ship.” She smiled at the boy. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Misja beamed. “Will you visit our tribe?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Vannis said. “I have to go. I need to find my friend.”
“Okay,” Misja said, though he seemed disappointed by her response.
“Well, if you go tell your tribe right now,” Vannis said, wanting time alone here to continue her investigation, “people from your tribe can come visit me here before I leave.”
“All right,” the boy said with childish enthusiasm. “I’ll go tell them right away.”
“Good,” she said. “Hurry.”
Misja turned and darted for the cave. Once he’d entered it, Vannis waited a few seconds, then worked the scanner to ensure that he had actually gone. Once she’d verified that fact, she returned her attention to the surrounding area, where the Ascendant had apparently crashed.
Her scans revealed nothing more, but just as she had decided to recall the Jem’Hadar and return to the ship, she noted what seemed to be several metal fragments visible on the ground. Circular and a cloudy gray in color, they looked to her like bits of superheated metal that had dripped to the ground. Remembering the description of the Ascendants themselves, though, she switched the scanner to examine biological material. The device immediately identified the drops as containing organic substances from a living being.
Quickly, before Misja could return with members of his tribe, Vannis recorded all the information she could, including DNA-related data. She also dug around one of the spatters of what she believed to be Ascendant blood, and secured the entire specimen into a compartment in the scanner.
Then she stood up, smiling. She enjoyed nothing more than satisfying the needs of the Founders, not only to the best of her own abilities, but to the best of any Vorta’s. She knew the members of the Great Link would be pleased with the information she had recovered here regarding the Ascendants.
This task at an end, she touched a control wrapped around her wrist, summoning the three Jem’Hadar to head back to her position. Once they had returned, she would transport with them off of this moon. She would order the ship back to Dominion space, where she would then work to fulfill the other purpose that the Founder had set her: the Overne had to eat, and the Rindamil had enough food to allow that to happen.
Odo felt the swirl of his cells as he willed each of his hands to sprout two additional fingers. He wanted to examine with all possible haste the data that Weyoun had just amassed, and the extra digits would allow him to work the companel with greater dexterity and swiftness. He could shapeshift more than seven fingers onto each hand, or even fashion himself a third arm, but he’d found through experimentation over the years that with this particular combination he operated most deftly.
Studying the readouts and panel configuration, Odo sent his hands marching across the controls. He checked the new file in which Weyoun had aggregated all of the data, then modified the privileges on it so that it could be accessed only by a Founder. Then he opened the file
and began to peruse its contents. Laas stood at his side, peering intently at the screen.
After Odo had informed Laas of what had been revealed to him about the Great Link, the Hundred, and the Progenitor, the two had transported up to Jem’Hadar Attack Vessel 971. According to Indurane, the intention of the Founders in sending out the Hundred had been to have them function essentially as lures and guideposts, attracting the attention of the Progenitor and pointing the way back to the Link. The ancient Founder had also claimed that the changeling god now had returned. Laas’s ensuing question—To where had the Progenitor returned?—had raised other issues in Odo’s mind, and had also hinted at a possible answer.
By Indurane’s account, the Progenitor had abandoned the Great Link long ago, before the changeling population had settled on a world hidden in the interstellar gas and dust of the Omarion Nebula. The Founders had sent out the Hundred from that planet, though, a location they had wanted to remain secret. If the unformed changelings dispersed throughout the galaxy formed a map to a specific place, then surely the Great Link would have wanted that place to be somewhere other than their own world. For if the Progenitor could follow the directions they had set out, then so too could others. Laas’s question of where the Progenitor had returned therefore became a matter of determining the location to which the Hundred had pointed.
Once aboard the Jem’Hadar ship, Odo and Laas had found Weyoun in his quarters. That had suited Odo, as he’d wanted to enlist the Vorta’s aid in private. He’d asked Weyoun to scour the Dominion databases to find out whether or not the Founders had kept any records of the Hundred, and the locations to which they had been dispersed. Weyoun had found numerous such files, scattered across the Dominion computer network, their data veiled by various encryption methodologies. It had taken some time, but Weyoun had eventually been able to decipher the data and collect it in a single file.
Now Odo set out to study that information. He sent his seven-fingered hands skittering across the companel. On the monitor, he brought up an image of the galaxy, the great disk comprising its spiral arms appearing edgewise and bulging at its center. “Here is Dominion space,” he said to Laas as he continued to work the panel. The picture on the screen shifted, the point of view drawing in close on one section, where an irregularly shaped volume of space became highlighted in blue. “And here are all of the locations to which the Hundred were sent,” he went on as he touched another series of controls. Small red circles began to appear beyond the borders of the Dominion, one after another, in a manner that looked haphaz-ard. Odo noted several markers in the galaxy’s other three quadrants, and one at the coordinates of the wormhole’s Gamma terminus, obviously denoting the place to where he himself had been sent.
“They’re not symmetrical,” Laas observed. “They don’t seem to be distributed in any pattern at all.”
“No,” Odo agreed.
“Where’s the Omarion Nebula?” Laas asked. Odo knew that Laas had no memory of the area from which he and the rest of the Hundred had been sent away, but had learned about it from other Founders.
Odo tapped again at the panel, which accompanied his movements with quick, flat tones. Around a patch of blue on the screen, a yellow line appeared, demarcating the Omarion borders. “Here,” Odo said, raising a hand and pointing at it. “And here’s the planet formerly occupied by the Great Link.” In response to his manual commands, a small yellow circle materialized within the confines of the nebula.
“It’s not at the center of the distribution,” Laas said.
“But Indurane told me that the Founders hoped that the Hundred would attract the attention of the Progenitor and draw it back to the Great Link,” Odo said. “There must be some central locus here.” Odo called up a mathematical catalogue from the ship’s computer, and searched a list of numerical methods. He selected an interpolation subroutine, then executed it against the set of data points identifying the locations to which the Hundred had been sent. A series of equations scrolled up the right side of the screen, at the same time that thin red lines emerged from each of the red circles. As values adjusted rapidly in the formulae, the lines moved, shifting their direction, but remaining anchored to the original data points.
For several minutes, Odo and Laas watched in silence as the mathematical process unfolded. Some lines would intersect each other, while others traced a path nowhere near them. Finally, though, more and more of the lines began to converge, until at last they all passed through a condensed region. The values in the equations stabilized and then froze, as did the lines. The volume of space through which the lines all passed sat near to, but outside of, the Omarion Nebula.
“Are there planets there?” Laas asked, obviously assuming, as Odo did, that the Founders would have chosen a specific place to reunite with their Creator.
Odo keyed in a request for information about that area of space. “There’s one star system there,” he said, reading from the monitor. “Eleven planets around a—” Odo stopped, not sure what to make of what he saw.
Laas must have sensed his confusion, because he said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The only star in the area that the Hundred point to has been the brightest object in the Great Link’s sky for weeks now,” Odo said. “It went nova.”
Taran’atar was surprised when he found himself unable to answer the Founder. Just recently, he had spent a great deal of time with Odo, and throughout his life, he had interacted with a number of changelings. He had given all of them nothing but his obedience. Now, though, something more than his instinctive drive to serve took hold of him. The Founder that peered up at him from an expressionless face carried herself, more noticeably than any other changeling he had ever met, with a mien of power. He knew that she had led the Dominion war against the Alpha Quadrant, and if not for the traitorous Cardassians and cowardly Breen, would have bested all foes. Even at the end, when she had chosen to cease fighting and save the Great Link, she could have debilitated the Federation and its allies even in a Dominion defeat, had she chosen to do so. As she regarded him coldly, he sensed that she had lost none of that strength.
“I asked you a question,” she said, and even though she spoke with an even tone, her words sounded to Taran’atar as if they held within them disapproval and an implicit threat. “Why are you here?” she asked again, and Taran’atar imagined that she had rarely had to repeat herself to subordinates. “Why are you in the Alpha Quadrant?”
Taran’atar blinked, hesitating still. He had thought that the Founder had wanted to know why he had chosen to come to visit her on Ananke Alpha, and not why he had left the Dominion. “I am in the Alpha Quadrant,” he finally responded, “because three-quarters of a year ago, I was sent by a Founder to reside on Deep Space 9.”
“Another Founder,” she said, her inscrutable features seeming to tighten. “Odo?” she asked, although the single-word question conveyed the Founder’s certainty about what the answer would be.
“Yes,” Taran’atar confirmed. “Odo.”
The Founder appeared to settle herself, then took a step backward and studied him. Taran’atar thought that he provided little to see: dressed in the simple Starfleet coverall, he carried no weapons or devices of any kind. Perhaps for that reason, since the Founder could focus on nothing but Taran’atar himself, her gaze felt penetrating to him. Finally, her scrutiny stopped at the left side of his neck. He felt the urge to reach up and cover the small slit in his flesh that marked where a delivery tube had for two decades entered his body. “You are free of the white,” the Founder observed.
“I am,” Taran’atar said carefully, uncomfortable admitting his difference from other Jem’Hadar. “My body synthesizes the enzyme it needs.”
The Founder appeared to consider this for a moment, moving away from him and pacing deeper into the room. At the far end, near a tall, thin geometric sculpture with a rough-hewn surface, she stopped and turned back to face him. “Is your lack of dependence on ketracel-white a result of you
r advanced age?” she asked, obviously recognizing him as a Jem’Hadar elder.
“I do not know,” Taran’atar said. “I do not think so. I believe that other, younger Jem’Hadar have been found with the same—” He had been about to utter the word deficiency, but did not want to show weakness to the Founder. “—the same characteristic,” he finished.
“Others have been found?” she asked from across the room. “By whom?” Again, her appearance seemed to harden.
“By several Vorta,” Taran’atar replied, “acting under the direction of Odo.”
“Odo,” she echoed. “He explicitly searched for Jem’Hadar without a dependence on ketracel-white? And then from that group selected you to live in the Alpha Quadrant?”
“Yes,” Taran’atar said. Despite the fact that it had been Odo who had ordered both the identification of his defect and his assignment to the Alpha Quadrant, Taran’atar felt right now as though he had himself failed this Founder.
She walked back over and stared up at him with a piercing gaze. “Why did he take those actions?” she asked.
“I—I do not know,” Taran’atar responded haltingly, unnerved at being asked to speak about a Founder’s motives—even though he had fought such doubts and concerns himself during his months on DS9.
“He did not tell you?” she questioned him. “When Odo sent you from the Dominion, he did not tell you what he wanted you to accomplish?”
Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Three Page 28