The Long Mirage

by David R. George III

  In the command chair, Wheeler Stinson felt a surge of adrenaline at the prospect of taking his ship and crew into an undefined, potentially dangerous situation. “Put it on-screen and magnify,” he ordered.

  “Aye, sir.”

  The main viewscreen quivered briefly, and although the pattern of stars didn’t change, a ship appeared in the center of the display. Stinson recognized the insect-like vessel at once, with its lavender lighting details and bow-mounted phased-polaron emitter. “That’s definitely a Jem’Hadar battle cruiser.”

  Standing beside the command chair, Odo offered a noise somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. Stinson didn’t quite know what to make of the Changeling. He knew that members of the crew had served with him aboard the original DS9, and some—Chief O’Brien and Lieutenant Commander Nog among them—considered him a friend. During the last two-plus years Odo had spent in the Alpha Quadrant, which had included occasional visits to the starbase, Stinson had interacted with him several times, but he hadn’t been able to get much of a read on the shape-shifter. The second officer understood that some of the reason for that might have to do with Odo’s oddly “unfinished” humanoid face. Stinson also had enough self-awareness to consider the possibility of his own unconscious racism after the Dominion War, but he worked hard to eliminate that as a cause. More than anything, he ascribed Odo’s inscrutability to the Changeling’s taciturn nature.

  “Lieutenant Viss,” Stinson said, “open a channel.”

  To Slaine’s left, Viss worked the controls of the communications station. “Hailing frequencies are open, sir.”

  “Jem’Hadar vessel, this is Commander Wheeler Stinson of the U.S.S. Defiant,” he said. “Please respond.” He waited for a moment, and when he received no response, he tried again. “U.S.S. Defiant to Jem’Hadar vessel, you are on a direct course for the Anomaly and the Alpha Quadrant beyond. We would therefore like to speak with you regarding the purpose of your journey.”

  At the comm station, the helmet of Viss’s environmental suit rotated an eighth of a turn left and right, the equivalent of a headshake by the aquatic Alonis. “We’re receiving no response, Commander,” she said. “It does not appear that they are receiving us. They appear to be jamming all incoming transmissions.”

  “Sensors are being jammed too,” Slaine reported.

  “Well, isn’t that just dandy?” Stinson said. They had known back on Deep Space 9 that their attempts to communicate with the crew of the Jem’Hadar were being blocked, but they hadn’t known the source. They hoped the interference originated elsewhere, and that by taking Defiant out to meet the ship, they could circumvent the issue. That left him with few options, and only one that did not put his ship and crew at risk. “Odo, what do you suggest?”

  “Clearly you cannot inform the Jem’Hadar that I am traveling with you if they refuse to communicate,” Odo said. “And if they’re blocking sensors, it’s likely that they can’t scan the Defiant. The only way to let them know that a Founder is aboard is to show them.”

  “You’ll be leaving the ship, then?” Stinson asked.

  “Yes,” Odo said. “If you bring the Defiant to a stop, I can disembark and make sure they see me as they approach.”

  “Lieutenant Tenmei, bring us out of warp,” Stinson said. “Full stop.”

  At the wide arc of the conn situated just ahead of the command chair, Tenmei operated her panel. “Bringing the ship out of warp,” she said. On the bridge, the tenor of the ambient noise changed as Defiant fell to sublight velocity. “Engines answering full stop.”

  “Time to arrival of the Jem’Hadar vessel: twenty-seven minutes,” Slaine announced at tactical.

  “You can leave the ship via the shuttlebay,” Stinson told Odo. “We’ll keep station near your position. If they do bring you aboard, we’ll pace the ship. If not, we’ll reopen the shuttlebay for you.”

  “They’ll bring me aboard,” Odo said confidently. “They’re Jem’Hadar. They won’t have any choice but to allow a Changeling on their ship.”

  Stinson nodded, understanding the genetically engineered imperative that guaranteed Jem’Hadar fealty to the Founders. But what about Taran’atar? he thought as Odo headed for the aft door. Stinson had never met the Jem’Hadar soldier sent on an observational mission to the original DS9, but after what had happened the prior month, he had learned all about him. When he left the old station, he never returned to the Dominion. He ignored his biological programming.

  “Odo,” Stinson said, and the shape-shifter stopped just as the door opened before him, “what if those are Jem’Hadar who are no longer impelled to obey the Founders?” Even as he asked the question, others occurred to him. “Or what if those aren’t Jem’Hadar aboard? What if that vessel was stolen from the Dominion, and that’s why its crew is jamming communications and sensors?”

  Odo didn’t hesitate before answering. “Then that’s something the Federation will need to know.” Then he continued through the door and off the bridge.

  vii

  * * *

  As Odo entered the shuttlebay, he turned Stinson’s questions over in his mind. He had told the lieutenant commander that the Federation needed to know if a group of Jem’Hadar had gone rogue, or if one of their vessels had been hijacked, but in truth, Odo needed to know. He had been gone for so long, and he had left with so many variables in motion—the scattering of the Great Link, the sporadic leadership of Laas and the distrust and odium he felt for “solids,” the irregular return of individual Founders, the isolationism of the Dominion—he could form no hypotheses about what had transpired in his absence.

  Once he had entered the shuttlebay and sealed the door behind him, he moved to a companel mounted on the bulkhead and contacted the bridge. He confirmed to Stinson his readiness to depart the ship. The lieutenant commander told him that the Defiant crew would depressurize the shuttlebay, then open the external hatch. Odo acknowledged the proposed sequence of events, then signed off and prepared for his change.

  In his mind, Odo coasted along the currents of existence, passing through time and space in a continual state of potential. He rode the flows, buoyed by them, but he perceived within the great river of reality the vortices that defined every stable state, that captured the possible in its pull—not gravity, not electromagnetism, not the strong or weak nuclear forces, but something like them, or like some combination of them. He mentally circled the whirlpool of rotational motion, then searched for and found their intrinsic derivatives: the rates of change that defined every position and every moment, and by implication, those that came before and those that would come after.

  Odo envisioned what he would become, intuited the course from his current form to his new form, though he had never traversed precisely that route. He found bliss in that originality, discovering the shape he would inhabit, but doing so anew, all his past incarnations mere wisps of memory. Being a Changeling meant being everything, all at once, and choosing one aspect for one moment and the moments that followed.

  Odo shifted his shape. His lungs filled and melted away, becoming a solid mass of his true physical nature. As the shuttlebay depressurized around him, as the atmosphere disappeared, his corporeal form liquesced. For an instant, his humanoid figure remained, but in appearance only. Then he released his control, allowed the artificial gravity to pull him down. His fluidic body dissolved into a cascade of biomimetic flux. His perceptions remained, though, and his will.

  When the round hatch in the deck split along its diameter, Odo spun upward. He gyred into a rising maelstrom of movement. The two semicircular sections of the hatch parted, revealing the inky depths of space beyond. Odo changed direction, arced over and down, and spilled out into the void.

  Unencumbered by the confines of Defiant, Odo morphed once more. His body expanded into a conical form, the texture of his outer hide changing, the substance of his internal biology taking on the shapes of organs. A pai
r of barbed antennae extended from the narrow front of the great spaceborne beast, and a trio of flattened, finlike tentacles grew from its aft end. In his new physique, Odo felt gravity, measured its impact on the local continuum, and adjusted his mass and dimensions accordingly, so that he could navigate the curvature of space-time.

  Defiant moved away, but not beyond the limits of Odo’s new perception. Time passed, and he waited for the disruption to come with the passage of the Jem’Hadar vessel. He prepared for the moment, and when the warp field of the ship registered at the far boundary of his senses, he shifted again. His reality as the spaceborne creature altered, and he became the humanoid Odo, but in form only. He took on his faux-Bajoran figure, but at one hundred times the scale.

  The Jem’Hadar battle cruiser neared. Odo could tell when his visage appeared on their monitors because the ship dropped out of warp. The vessel approached him at sublight speed, slowing as it did so, until it floated in space before him.

  Odo sent a message by causing his body to shimmer in imitation of a Dominion transporter beam. Then he solidified and changed yet another time, assuming his normal humanoid form, sans lungs, shrinking to its usual size.

  A moment later, he felt the sensation of dematerialization.

  viii

  * * *

  Odo felt the transporter platform beneath his feet. More than that, the pull of artificial gravity tugged at his body, and he realized that his multiple changes of form had exhausted him. Out of habit, Odo established lungs in his chest and began to respire, but he vowed to himself to alter his shape no more before he had time to regenerate. He stood still for the moment, not wanting to expend any more energy than necessary.

  Two figures stood in front of the transporter platform. Odo recognized them at once: Weyoun and Rotan’talag, the Vorta and Jem’Hadar with whom he had spent the most time during his eight years residing in the Dominion. Odo expected Weyoun to speak up and explain the situation; as a Vorta, his function aboard a Jem’Hadar ship, among a Jem’Hadar crew, would be to lead. Instead, Rotan’talag stepped forward. Of even greater note, he did not wait for Odo to speak.

  “Founder,” he said.

  “Rotan’talag,” Odo said. He saw that the Jem’Hadar had advanced in rank from third to second, but not to first, which made his appearing to take charge even more peculiar. The same search that had identified Taran’atar as not being dependent on ketracel-white had turned up three others of his kind, including Rotan’talag. Odo assigned him to Jem’Hadar Attack Vessel 971, a ship initially designated as a sentry and stationed in orbit of the world on which the Great Link had settled. Odo made frequent visits to the vessel, in part so that he could have contact with Rotan’talag and Weyoun in his seemingly futile attempts to cultivate their development, to help them mature into individuals unencumbered—or at least less encumbered—by their genetically engineered ­prerogatives.

  “I am pleased to see you,” Odo said, “and you as well, Weyoun.” The Vorta bowed his head in obvious deference, though Rotan’talag conspicuously did not. “Why are you here, outside Dominion space?”

  “The crew and passengers of this vessel have chosen to move on from the Dominion,” Rotan’talag said.

  “Passengers?” Odo echoed. Other than their crews, he had only ever known Changelings to travel aboard Jem’­Hadar battle cruisers. “Are there other Founders aboard?”

  “No,” Weyoun rushed to say before Rotan’talag could reply. “We are graced only with your presence, Founder.”

  Odo did not care for the obsequious response, but he also did not find it unexpected. Based on his interactions so far with Weyoun and Rotan’talag, it suggested he should concentrate on speaking with the Jem’Hadar. “Weyoun, a Starfleet vessel, the Defiant, is stationed nearby in space. Contact its captain, Commander Stinson, and tell him that you are doing so at my request. Tell him that I am safely aboard your ship, and that I will talk to him shortly.”

  “Yes, Founder, immediately,” the Vorta said, again bowing his head before scampering away.

  Of Rotan’talag, Odo asked, “What can you tell me of the Great Link?” The communal sea of Changelings had disbanded nine years prior under extreme circumstances.

  “Since your journey through the Anomaly, only a small number of additional Founders have returned,” Rotan’talag said. “Until recently, those that had come back to the Dominion had aggregated in groups of two or three. Now almost all of those that have returned are together in a single link.”

  “Do you interact with the new link?” Odo asked. “Does anybody?”

  “I have not,” Rotan’talag said, “but there are Vorta and Jem’Hadar crews whose ships have been assigned to protect the new link, and the Founders sometimes communicate with them.”

  “And what about communicating with anybody else?” Odo wanted to know.

  “As far as I know, the Founders predominantly stay linked, almost never emerging,” Rotan’talag said. “Consequently, I believe that they have infrequent contact with any ‘solids,’ and only with the crews of the ships around their world.”

  None of that surprised Odo, though it did disappoint him. He had hoped that more Changelings would have come back to the Dominion during the time he’d been away. “What about the Dominion itself?” he asked. “Does it remain in isolation?”

  “The borders are still closed,” Rotan’talag confirmed, “both to incoming and outgoing vessels, for the most part.”

  “ ‘For the most part,’ ” Odo repeated. “You are exempting your own vessel.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have passengers aboard,” Odo said, still trying to fathom that. “Why are you here?”

  “As I mentioned,” Rotan’talag said, “we have chosen to move on from the Dominion.” The Jem’Hadar had indeed said that earlier, but Odo had been so focused on the radical idea of passengers aboard a battle cruiser that he had overlooked it.

  “What exactly does that mean?” Odo asked. He stepped from the transporter platform onto the deck.

  “Everybody aboard this ship has made the individual decision to seek a different way of life than servitude and subjugation,” Rotan’talag said. “Collectively, we plotted to seize control of this vessel, debark the members of the crew unwilling to join with us, and leave the Dominion.”

  Odo stared at Rotan’talag in stunned silence. In the wake of the assault on him by the shape-shifting Ascendant colony, which had left him as close to death as he had ever come, Odo had never felt less like a god. He had never subscribed to the rhetoric of the Founders that equated their steel-fisted control over the Dominion with actual godhood, though he had long recognized the truth of the Changelings’ role in engineering species like the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta. Odo could conceive of no circumstances in which he would consider himself a deity, but he felt genuine pride in learning that Rotan’talag and Weyoun sought to lead a group of Dominion citizens to a new and better way of life. He didn’t know how much influence he’d had on the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta, but he had at the very least planted the seeds of self-determination. He could not have been more pleased.

  “How many are aboard?” Odo asked.

  “Three thousand seven hundred thirteen,” Rotan’talag said. “Plus you, Founder.”

  “Are they all Jem’Hadar and Vorta?”

  “No, we have members of numerous species on board,” Rotan’talag said. “There are Karemma, Overne, Thepnossen, Bronis, and Ourentia.”

  Odo almost could not credit what he heard. The notion of the Jem’Hadar, the ruthless soldiers of the Dominion, working with other member races—besides the Vorta—seemed almost inconceivable. “What do you intend to do?”

  Before Rotan’talag could answer, Weyoun reappeared. “Founder, I have spoken directly with Commander Stinson aboard the Defiant,” he said. “I passed along your message. He told me that if he did not hear from you directly wit
hin fifteen minutes, he would have no choice but to open fire on our ship.”

  “A good Starfleet officer,” Odo said wryly, understanding Stinson’s stance, but not particularly appreciative of the threat.

  “He wants to ensure your safety,” Rotan’talag said. “In my time serving the Founders, I would not have given fifteen minutes of leeway.”

  “Then you don’t serve the Founders anymore?”

  “Not in the way we used to,” Weyoun said. “With you here, of course, we are happy to serve, but we have discovered a new interpretation of our directives.”

  “And what would that interpretation be?” Odo asked.

  “It is the interpretation you gave us,” Rotan’talag said. “We serve the Founders not just by satisfying the purposes for which we were initially created, but by fulfilling the potential also bred into us.” Interestingly, though the Jem’Hadar spoke to Odo with respect, he did so without reverence.

  “What are your plans?” Odo asked, reiterating the question he’d posed before Weyoun had come back.

  “We will take this ship through the Anomaly and into the Alpha Quadrant,” Rotan’talag said. “There, we will seek an uninhabited world on which we can settle.”

  “Why in the Alpha Quadrant?” Odo asked, not sanguine about such a course. It would necessarily entail a Jem’Hadar presence in or near the Federation and other powers. “Why not in the Gamma Quadrant?”

  “We wish to begin our new lives far from the Dominion,” Weyoun said, “so that there is as little chance as possible of us being hunted down and either made to return or killed.”

  “We want to make our own choices,” Rotan’talag said, “and to live our lives free from tyranny.”

  Tyranny, Odo thought. Even with their plans to leave the Founders and the Dominion behind for good, the single word marked the strongest sentiment yet about how Rotan’talag and Weyoun had changed—how they had grown. But Odo still foresaw trouble ahead, if not from the Dominion, then from the Federation—or from the Cardassians or the Klingons or the Romulans.