by Diane Carey
“Admiral,” Sisko began, trying to be temperate, “we have an opportunity here to put an end to this war once and for all. We should seize the moment.”
“I agree,” Martok said. “We must move on to Cardassia Prime and do it now.”
Neither of them raised their voices. This wasn’t the time for shouting.
Instead, they would have to count upon the hope that Ross trusted them for their experience, the fact that they had had more combined time in the field—in battle—than he’d had in Starfleet altogether.
Come on, admiral, I know you’ve got it in you. Give the hard order.
Ross wiped his bleeding lip, paused, looked from one to the other on his own split screen, and blinked his stinging eyes.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said simply. “We press on.”
Martok thumped his command chair. “My people will sing songs about this moment!”
Ross shook his head wearily, though he seemed to collect a strength even he hadn’t thought he possessed. “Let’s hope we’re around to hear them.”
The transmission was cut off at the source. The screen flipped back to a disturbing view of the shattered wreckage from the last several hours of unremitting siege.
“All right, people,” Sisko said evenly, “you heard the orders. Let’s finish what we started.”
CHAPTER
7
On Cardassia Prime, everything had changed in an instant. Weyoun’s blunder had rocketed around the planet like shockwaves rushing from pole to pole and back again stronger. Whole regiments of Cardassian troops were finding their way through the secret channels to the resistance. Ekoor had opened a hundred veins of communication that yesterday would have been suicide. Now they were filled with eager voices, soldier and civilian alike. The planet had had enough of the Dominion, its Founders, its hive-headed Jem’Hadar, and its ethereal spook Vorta.
Damar huddled with Kira and Ekoor around last-minute preparations for their assault on Dominion Headquarters. Their forces had swelled mightily in the last two hours. Just in this cellar were five more Cardassians, including two soldiers and three civilians, armed and ready.
Ekoor troubled over the schematic Damar had drawn of the Headquarters’ interior.
“According to this map,” he said, “it’s a long way from the cargo door to the briefing room.”
“That could be a problem,” Kira agreed. “The explosion’s going to alert everyone in the building.”
“If I know Weyoun,” Damar told them, “there’ll only be a handful of Jem’Hadar on duty. He’ll have sent the rest to hunt down Cardassians—”
The rest of his sentence was stripped away in the sound of an explosion, a resonant boom that came down through the walls. The floor trembled.
Kira tensed. “What the hell—?”
Garak rushed down the stairs and nearly fell. “The Jem’Hadar! They’re leveling the city, building by building!”
“We have to go,” Kira said, “right now!”
Damar stayed any action with a temperate hand. “Once we get inside Dominion Headquarters, we stop for nothing and no one until we capture the Changeling. For Cardassia!”
“For Cardassia!”
Kira Nerys watched as all the Cardassians dodged from the cellar, fired by the opportunity to take back their planetary pride, led by the rogue officer who had become a legend.
Damar? A legend? How things could change.
She waited until they were all out of the room. She wanted to make sure nothing had been forgotten which they could use. They wouldn’t be coming back to this place.
As she put her foot on the bottom step, she cast one gaze to the least likely and most disturbing corner, the place where Mila’s body had been tucked, wrapped in a tarp.
There, she paused. In the shadow, Garak stood mute over Mila’s clumpy form.
Kira thought he’d gone up with the others. When Mila had been killed, Garak had shown only one moment of horror before returning to his typical self, casting off trouble like shedding rain from his shoulders. Now Kira could see the lie. And the truth.
“Garak?” she began gently.
“I’m coming, Commander,” he said, as if expecting her to speak up. “I’m just saying goodbye.”
Though she tried to leave, assuming he would want to be alone, Kira responded instead to an inner alarm that told her he needed something other than solitude. They’d known each other a very long time, had never really been friends, but had fought side by side long enough to have a certain bond of understanding that she felt very powerfully now. Here was Garak, as blithe and lubricated a salesman-spy as the universe could boast, this time with all his masks down. Kira understood that right now she was seeing the real Garak, a man displaced for years from the home he had once served honestly and with great energy. Today he was home again, and about to be again thrown out.
“During all these years of exile,” he began without looking at her, “I used to imagine what it would be like to come home, maybe even to live in this house once again with Mila. But now … she’d dead. And this house is about to become nothing more than a pile of rubble. My Cardassia is gone.”
Kira offered a sympathetic pause. “Then fight for a new Cardassia.”
Another explosion rumbled closer than the one before. The walls rattled. Pebbles and dust fell upon the tarp covering the old Cardassian woman.
Garak watched the dust settle into the tarp’ folds.
“I have a better reason to fight, Commander,” he said. “Revenge.”
* * *
“But Thot Pran, I have come to depend on having you here at my side. Your sage military advice has proven invaluable to me and to the Dominion.”
The Founder struggled to hold her form, despite the cracking of her skin like old paint and the intense pain it caused throughout her body. Everyone around her saw the terrible plague eating her humanoid form on the outside. What they could not see was that all her form, inside as well, was made now of sharp-edged flakes, flintlike chips each cutting into the other moment by moment.
The staticky voice of the Breen general had grown shrill as he protested all her arguments. He was growing tired of her. Or perhaps he was coming to suspect that she was keeping him here in order to hold influence over him or eventually to hold him hostage….
No matter. He was only a small cog in the wheels of her plan. If she could no longer deceive him, it was little loss.
“Very well,” she accepted. “If you feel that the seriousness of the situation demands your presence on the front lines, I will not stand in your way. In fact, knowing that you will be leading our troops into battle is very reassuring.”
He blathered another burst at her, then bowed and swung for the door, leading his Breen officers with him.
Near the monitor, Weyoun had been watching in silence. Now he spoke.
“I still can’t help but wonder.”
The Founder turned to him. “Wonder what?”
“What’s under that helmet.”
She moved in agony to the monitor. “A braver man than you. Though I do find the shrillness of his voice tiresome.”
Feeling a wave of ghastly weakness roll through her limbs, she turned away from him. Holding this shape was almost as agonizing as knowing she could no longer dissolve from it. Somehow this illness trapped her between nightmare and torture. She could not alter, yet holding solidity took constant effort. What would she become if she gave up? If her form took its own route?
She tried to walk away, to go to her desk, when her legs folded beneath her and gravity came to pull her down. Would she puddle on the floor, a mass of crackled liquid? Would she crash into a million bits like shattering glass?
Weyoun’s grip wrapped around her and held her on her feet.
“Founder! What’s wrong?”
What an idiot.
“I’m dying, that’s what’s wrong,” she told him, disinclined to spare whatever he had for feelings.
“Perhaps if you w
ere to rest for a while … revert to your natural state—”
“I only wish I could. But I haven’t be able to change form in weeks. Ironic … isn’t it? That I might die as a solid….”
“You’re not going to die,” Weyoun desperately insisted. “You’re a god!”
“Gods are not always immortal,” she said. Was she speaking to a child in fact? Very well. “You must see to it that the Dominion does not die with me. Promise me that.”
As he shifted position, his pale face and colorless eyes took on a genuine fear. “But Founder, what can I, a mere Vorta….”
Her hand, as if disembodied and possessing a will of its own, raced to his throat. The full power of her own will now took over, squeezing the life out of him that the Founders in their wisdom had given him in the first place.
“Promise me!” she growled.
Fighting for breath, Weyoun attempted a terrified nod. “I promise … gladly.”
Even she was unsure what she was asking of him, how he would protect the Dominion without her in this quadrant to guide him. The Vorta needed guides.
“My loyal Weyoun,” she went on, “the only solid I’ve ever trusted.”
Overwhelmed, Weyoun managed to bow even in this awkward position. “I live only to serve you.”
“And you’ve served me well. I don’t mind dying … what’s painful is knowing that my entire race is dying of the same illness and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I would give my life to save yours,” Weyoun said with great emotional trouble.
“I only wish it were that easy.”
Her hand—she must unclamp it. This took a great effort, though she finally gave him back his existence.
“Your loyalty is comforting,” she said. She pulled out of his grip. Somehow her strength had been renewed for now, through the desperation of her concern for her fellow Changelings.
Weyoun let her go without further attendance. He rubbed his throat. He seemed surprised.
Was he also honored? She thought he should be.
She thought he’d better be.
* * *
The cap of the Kai spun into the abyss, taking with it all the symbolic devotion of a lifetime’s meditation and trial.
Dukat watched the little cap whirl away into the fire and be consumed. How completely wondrous—a full Kai, shedding the shackles of the Prophets, casting her lot with the antiprophet Pah-wraiths, joining with Dukat in his cause to finally come out from under the pall of some alien power. At least this power was native to Bajor, native to the Alpha Quadrant. A much better platform from which to launch any plan, he believed.
Nearby, Kai Winn crossed the final path to the rejection of everything she had previously embraced. Solemnly, she removed her ceremonial cloak and pitched it over the edge of the abyss into the charged flames. With a gasp of consumption, the robe disappeared.
Now she stood only in a simple penitent’s smock. Even the pin in her hair was plucked away. Her hair fell about her shoulders. She looked suddenly free, even younger.
“Finally,” she breathed, “I rid myself of the Prophets! Once and for all! And shed a lifetime of hypocrisy!”
With the flames blazing behind her, she turned to Dukat and in a shock of boldness clasped him passionately and drove him into a long exuberate kiss.
Stunned and invigorated, Dukat gazed at her. “I’ve never seen you so radiant.”
“I feel like a young woman!” she crowed. “Waiting for my lover to come and sweep me off my feet!”
“Do you give yourself willingly to the Pah-wraiths?” he asked, just to make sure she wasn’t consumed by something that might distract her from their reason to be here.
“With all my heart!”
“Then … call to them.”
Winn, no longer a Kai, broke the embrace. “Bring me the book!”
A shiver of hesitation ran through Dukat. To touch the book? The thing that had last blinded him when he dared invade its private and sacred envelope?
“I said bring it!” Winn insisted.
This last step had to be taken. Dukat realized that if Winn were to give up all her securities, he would have to show a willingness to do the same. Surely the Pah-wraiths would smile on him and not allow the book to hurt him a second time, to defy their healing powers.
He bent before the book, muttered an inaudible apology just in case. So many unexplained powers in the universe—who was he to suggest any might be silly? If the book itself had no particular power, surely something attached to it did and the book was the wand which channeled it, for he had felt the power himself.
He picked up the enormous bindings. He offered it to Winn with a hint of minor ceremony.
She opened the book, as Dukat cradled it against his chest. Standing at the brink of the flaming abyss, Winn began to chant again, slowly at first, then more rapidly.
MEEK RAK DORRAH PAH-WRAN
YELIM CHA ONO KOSST AMOJAN …
SHAY TA-HEL TER-RAH NO’VALA DE
RAM
AKA’LU FAR CHE …
And the flames grew higher and hotter. And the light grew bright with joy.
* * *
“Sisko to Bashir. Report.”
It had taken him a few minutes to ask for this one. He didn’t mind getting reports from O’Brien about the engineering status or from Ezri about hull damage or from Worf about the tactical situation, but asking Bashir to break off from tending the wounded belowdecks just to report on how many crewmates they’d lost—that was a hard one and it always would be, Emissary or not.
Sisko felt eminently human as Bashir’s voice came up through the comm.
“Three dead, eight wounded, four of them critically.” The doctor sounded strained in part, and somehow relieved in another.
That made sense. For a major battle, they’d been lucky.
“I need every able-bodied crewman at his post,” Sisko challenged.
“I won’t keep anyone here a second longer than I have to,” Bashir promised.
Hopeful, at least. No one was trying to talk him out of pursuing the retreating Dominion forces and putting an end to this once and for all. Even Ross hadn’t contacted him. The decision had been—thankfully—made.
Now they had to live with it.
“She did pretty well for a first date, don’t you think, Captain?” Nog asked as he nursed his helm.
“I do, Ensign,” Sisko offered.
He didn’t stay near the helm, but instead moved to Worf and Ezri.
“Our phaser banks have been fully recharged,” Worf said, with a measure of satisfaction that proved Sisko’s assessment that they’d been lucky. “But we’re down to only forty-five quantum torpedoes.”
“That’ll have to do,” Sisko said. To Ezri he offered, “How’re you holding up, old man?”
“All things considered, I’d rather be on Risa,” she said with a little smile.
“That makes two of us.”
He returned her smile, wondering how much comfort old Curzon Dax’s life force could offer a young girl who had never been in a battle situation.
So far, so good. And that’s what worried him.
He crossed past the repair crews and tried not to get their attention with his presence. On the other side of the bridge Odo was gazing uneasily into a monitor. Sisko didn’t ask—the shapeshifter would speak up if there were anything to say.
For a moment Odo remained silent, but then voiced a genuine concern. “Have you seen the reports from Cardassia? The Dominion has begun destroying Cardassian cities … millions of people are dying. They’re being dragged out of their homes and executed.”
“Are the Cardassians fighting back?”
“They’re trying to. But what chance to do civilians have against the Jem’Hadar?”
“I wouldn’t count them out just yet, Constable,” Sisko offered, “not with Kira down there.”
Odo smiled reservedly, apparently taking the compliment as it was meant, trying to find some comfo
rt in it that Kira was indeed still alive, that there might be a future for them yet somehow, somewhere. The bird and the fish might find a place where both could live, if only this single great struggle could be won.
“Captain,” Nog interrupted. “We’re approaching the Cardassian defense perimeter.”
“Let’s see what they have waiting for us.” Sisko stepped down to the command area. “Onscreen.”
The ship’s company bolted to action, squaring away the wreckage on the deck, clearing the walkways, taking positions. If anything wasn’t repaired by now, time was up. They’d have to make do with whatever they had working. Positions of the dead and wounded would have to be covered. That was up to each individual department head and not Sisko’s problem any more. He drove that concern from his mind as others came to clutter it.
Just then O’Brien stepped back onto the bridge, reading a padd as he approached the command area to make a report.
“I’ve cross-polarized the phaser emitters, which should give us a—”
Sisko didn’t respond. No one did. O’Brien stopped talking as he looked up.
Together they all stared at the image on the forward screen.
Before them, a virtually impenetrable wall of Breen and Jem’Hadar fighting ships, defense installations, and weapons platforms orbited Cardassia Prime, a bristling net of destructive power, formidable and terrifying. Knitted like barbed wire, all enemy forces had taken an organized position—nothing seemed random at all this time. This wasn’t just a formation. It was a nearly solid wall of killing energy waiting to be released.
On the main fleet channel, a broadcast came through which Ezri did not bother to announce.
“This is Admiral Ross to all ships. We all know what we have to do. All forces form up for Operation Final Assault.”
Sisko turned to his crew, putting the horror on the forward screen behind him as he met all their eyes.
“You heard the man. Let’s do it.”