by Diane Carey
The disease crawled into his cells as his arm flexed and molded with hers, losing structural integrity and flooding each to the other. It tried to overwhelm him. It was strong and tenacious as any cancer, but this time science and determination had learned how to turn back its insidious tide.
Odo closed his eyes and concentrated on all his personal and professional victories, the pride he had in the people he knew were really his people—his shipmates, stationmates, and all of the Federation who had stood by him for his individual self while the Changelings merely tempted and crowed at him to lose that self, as if that were somehow better.
With the force of mental and physical will, he pushed the regeneration up his arm into the milky substance that was both their hands, and farther into her body. Gradually she learned to take over, to possess the wondrous cure that could beat the disease. He felt her strain and confusion, the momentary loss of control, but he helped her continue to find the trail of health and dismiss the disease.
When he opened his eyes, the female Changeling’s face was no longer a cracked plaster of near-death. Once again it was smooth as mercury.
She looked wonderful. She looked peaceful.
The cure wasn’t all he had given her. He had lifted the responsibility away from her and taken it upon himself. For the first time, he felt strong enough to bear it.
“Odo!”
Kira had apparently had enough. When she’d seen this before, it hadn’t gone well.
“Move away, Odo,” she ordered.
Both Kira and Garak now had their weapons raised and aimed at the female’s face.
“That won’t be necessary, Nerys,” Odo told her. He looked at the female. “Will it?”
His hand returned to his own body and let the female go. She was cured—beautiful, passive.
With a nod of what might be regret—he couldn’t tell any more—the female Changeling took one step toward Kira. “If you’ll step aside, I’ll order the Jem’Hadar to cease fire.”
Kira hesitated and looked at Odo. He gave her a reassuring nod. For the first time in his relationship with the female of his kind, he was in control. He had given her a gift she did not deserve—her life. She would, for a change and from now on, do what he wanted.
Lowering her weapon doubtfully, Kira allowed the female to approach the monitor and begin working the console.
Garak and Kira clustered around Odo. He felt wonderful and superior, confident and proud at their expressions of respect and wonder.
“Very impressive, Constable,” Garak offered.
Odo was looking now at Kira.
“Did you know the Link would cure her?” she asked him.
“I was hoping it would. Thank you for having faith in me,” he said to both of them.
Garak flared at him. “Now that the Founder can shapeshift again, perhaps it would be wise to secure her in a containment field?”
“Don’t worry, Garak. She won’t try to escape. She’s agreed to stand trial for war crimes.”
Kira looked impressed—and doubtful. “Whatever you said to her in the Link must’ve been very persuasive.”
Garak not only looked doubtful, but downright disbelieving. “I’m surprised she didn’t insist on returning to the Gamma Quadrant so she could cure her own people.”
“There’s no need of that,” Odo told them sadly.
“Why not?” Kira’s eyes narrowed.
He offered her the kindest gaze he could manage. “Because I’m going in her place.
The blow was encompassing. She didn’t seem to fully understand what he meant. “You’re leaving?” she asked. “For how long?”
He turned to her, trying very hard to be gentle and strong. She was the bird, she must fly, and not be dragging a fish who belonged near an altogether different island. With him in the Great Link, there would be no more invasion, no more imperialism from the Changeling civilization. He was not going back to be one of their vague children, lost in a dream. He was going back to teach them what it meant to be an individual.
Could she see that? Could she take it?
She would have to.
“Nerys,” he began, then paused. “It’s time I rejoined my people in the Great Link.”
* * *
How could he explain it to her? He wanted to be with her, not with them. The weren’t really “his” people. They were physically like him, but that was the end of it. They had sent him out as an infant to go among the solids and learn. If they didn’t want to know now what he had learned—they were going to hear it anyway. There was no inherent good or bad in Changeling or solid. The Changelings could merge from now until eternity and still only be a million individuals.
Why had it taken so many millions of deaths of his own people—yes, the solids of the Alpha Quadrant—before he understood that?
He had to make them see it. In their way, they were just liquid solids, each to himself ultimately. They were born single, and they died single. How could the middle be any different?
That was what he had learned and he was damned well going to make them understand if it took the next century. This foolish war against all solids—it was the Changelings’ lack of understanding that had caused their fears. As the solids had once hunted them out of fear, they now hunted the solids out of fear—and that was simply primitive.
Shameful.
He felt supremely confident, even eager. He had his own conquest to exact. Go be with his own people? No. If he were to be with his own, he would stay here. If he were to do the best thing for himself, he would stay.
Even as the temptation fluttered within him, he knew he would go to the Link. His friends here still needed him … they needed him to be in the Gamma Quadrant, guarding their future, doing the best he could with all his strengths as a Changeling, not as a solid.
He would go, he would stay, and he would teach all the other fish how to be birds.
CHAPTER
11
The capital city was in ruins. Around the planet other cities were burning as well, through the days and into the nights. Fires billowed with ironic beauty against the horizon of obliterated buildings, collapsed homes, and burned-out shells. Bodies by the dozens were strewn along the street like paper litter.
“Eight hundred million dead….”
Julian Bashir looked out over the city from the window of the briefing room. He’d been assigned here to triage the wounded, but there weren’t any. Long-range scans showed that the Jem’Hadar had been superior in their efficiency. Who they had set out to kill, they had killed.
Beside him, Garak looked over the ruins of his native planet. “And the casualty reports are still coming in. My exile is officially over, doctor. I have returned home for good. And what have I found awaiting me? A wasteland.”
Bashir gazed at him thoughtfully. “Wastelands can be made fertile again,” he offered.
How hollow it sounded.
“It’s easy for you to be optimistic. They’re not your dead.”
Bashir held back pointing out that all dead were his dead, that it was patently racist to think that somehow the suffering of strangers who looked alike was closer suffering. Yet, he knew that was how some people thought. No point arguing surface moralities right now, was there?
“You must have some hope for the future, Garak,” he pointed out instead. “Otherwise you wouldn’t stay.”
“You have it backward,” Garak told him. “I have to stay, even without hope. So I’m afraid this is goodbye. After seven years, you’re going to have to find yourself a new lunch partner and a new tailor. I’m afraid I’ve hemmed my last pair of pants.”
Bashir offered a meager smile. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy … I wonder what’s next for you, Garak.”
“Who can say, Doctor?” his Cardassian friend said. He seemed reluctant to say more, except finally to add, “We live in uncertain times.”
They looked at each other, without the typical jovial sparring that usually went on between them. This was a
time to lose loved ones, to lose friends. Bashir felt his chest grow hollow with the fear that big changes were coming, that the family they’d built over the past seven years, sometimes the hard way, was about to get a whole bunch of reassignment orders.
But what else? How long could a given condition go on? Children grew up, people died, relationships came and departed, things changed, and without those alterations there would be no sense to cherish the precious.
“I hope all goes well for you, Garak,” he offered. “The galaxy is going to get very big for a while, after seeming very small lately … there’s going to be a great deal of rebuilding. Much sorrow, I suppose, but there are things to be learned from all that.”
“You optimize too much, Julian,” Garak said with a little chuckle. “Of all of us, you’ve had the steadiest life over the past several years. Somebody gets a cut, you patch it up. We’ve all gone through major changes. You’ve managed to hold onto your anchor most of the way.”
Bashir sighed. “I suppose I don’t like changes very much, Garak. Usually I just sit back and wait, and things settle down again. This time, I don’t see the settling any time soon. There’s not going to be any more time at anchor for me.”
Garak smiled and his eyes flared. “Ah, but when one is in love, one doesn’t want to be held down. Does one?”
Bashir managed a laugh. “No, one doesn’t really. Oh, my goodness, I feel so terrible thinking about that while looking out at … all this.”
“We Cardassians brought this upon ourselves. Intrigue eventually turns upon the intriguer.”
“And you would know.”
“Yes, I would.” Garak held out his hand. “Good luck, Doctor.”
Though there was a sadness, Bashir felt a rush of hope as he clasped Garak’s hand. “Good luck to you … citizen.”
* * *
“This is a moment worth savoring. To victory—hard fought and well earned.”
Chancellor Martok drained his glass, as he stood with Ben Sisko and Admiral Ross on the balcony overlooking the ravaged city which now stood in the possession of the Allied force.
Sisko glared out at the carnage. The people had been dragged from their homes and slaughtered, dumped in the street, and their homes torched. The tortured landscape closed his throat. He could no more take a drink than bring those people back to life.
This was victory?
He told himself it was nothing to the carnage that would have taken place if the Jem’Hadar hadn’t been stopped.
Still….
“Suddenly I’m not thirsty,” he muttered.
Ross put his drink on the balcony rail. “Neither am I.”
Martok poured himself a second glass. “Before you waste too many tears,” he said, “remember those are Cardassians lying dead out there. The Bajorans would call this poetic justice.”
Sisko bristled. “That still doesn’t mean I have to drink a toast over a million dead bodies.”
He put his own glass down and followed Ross back into the briefing room, leaving Martok alone to gaze at the devastation with his own Klingon sensibilities. To Martok, those people had paid a price they’d set themselves up to pay. The Klingons had dealt with retribution for centuries uncounted.
Well, they could have it.
The men collected their various convictions and all the pall of winning at such cost, and gratefully left the crushed hulk of Cardassia. The voyage back to Deep Space Nine was solemn and lacked conversation. Everyone seemed to prefer that.
Sisko certainly did. What more was there to say? If there was one person left on either side, in any faction, who didn’t know why they had been fighting, he was living in a shoebox and knitting spiderwebs.
He entered the station to a blaze of fanfare and applause. He led his crew onto the Promenade, met Kasidy and Jake and their embracing arms, saw with deep satisfaction Odo and Kira walking together, Bashir and Ezri, O’Brien and his family … even Worf seemed placid.
Within an hour, a short blip of time, the wardroom was crowded with dignitaries and representatives for the formal cease-fire.
The female shapeshifter was here, looking smooth as ever. Two Vorta, three Jem’Hadar Firsts. When he arrived, they were all seated around the curved table, official surrender documents layered on its surface.
Sisko joined Admiral Ross, Chancellor Martok, and High Centurion Lar of the Romulan delegation. Among the witnesses filling the room were all Sisko’s close command family, other Starfleet officers he didn’t know well, and several more Vorta and Jem’Hadar.
The female shapeshifter signed the documents—he would have to look later to see if she had a name or had simply squished an X—and looked up at them. She looked unusually … happy?
“The war between the Dominion and the Federation Alliance is now over,” she announced without holding back.
Admiral Ross surveyed the documents, then looked up.
“Four hundred years ago, a victorious general spoke the following words at the end of another costly war. ‘Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we’ve won in war.’”
A moment of silence ushered in an appreciation for the rightness of vigilance.
Sisko nodded at his guards. Two of them stepped up behind the female shapeshifter. With her usual dignity she stood up and unashamedly headed for the door.
As she passed Odo, however, she paused. That made everybody nervous.
“It’s up to you now, Odo,” she said.
What was that supposed to mean?
Sisko watched, but there was no signal of clarification.
Odo simply nodded, and the female continued out of the room without another word.
The Jem’Hadar filed after her, and the Vorta after them, all flanked by Starfleet guards. There would be no more trouble. It was really over.
The significance of the fact that all this had started at Deep Space Nine and now was ending here was not lost on Sisko. He felt a shining pride that history had just been made on his doorstep. Maybe there should be a plaque.
He met the eyes of his friends, one by one, and gradually they filed from the room, everyone overcome and unable to make casual conversation.
With a gesture, he escorted Martok and Ross out onto the Promenade for the final brilliant moment of this day.
People nodded politely at them as they walked, but kept their distance. As Sisko and his colleagues chose one of the wide Promenade viewports on the wormhole side, other people moved away to other windows, letting the three men have the best view and a bubble of privacy from which to enjoy it.
There, in space, was the Jem’Hadar armada of warships, escorted on each side by Federation starships. The armada approached the wormhole without signal or declaration. As the unexplainable maw opened, sparkling and swirling, the Federation ships peeled away, clearing the armada to be gulped down by the giant spacial causeway to the Gamma Quadrant.
The wormhole accepted them, then drawstringed itself closed and disappeared. Hard to believe it was still there, just invisible. Would it remain for a year, or a million years? No one could tell. They still didn’t really understand how stable it was, or whether it was a plaything or repository for the Prophets who lived inside.
Sarah? Are you watching?
“Gentlemen,” Ross began, “for the first time in two and a half years, there isn’t a single Dominion ship anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant.”
Sisko shook his head. He actually hadn’t thought of that.
“Now, that … is worth toasting,” he said.
“Finally!” Martok looked around and saw Quark’s bar just over there, saw a Ferengi waiter carrying a familiar bottle and some glasses to a table of Klingons. “Waiter! Bring over that bloodwine!”
The waiter didn’t even pretend to argue. His simply came out of the bar, crossed the Promenade and fumbled for a mo
ment about how he was going to hold the tray, the glasses and the bottle without ditching the whole affair.
Martok saved him by pouring the wine himself and offering glasses to Ross and Sisko. “I’m glad we agree there’s something worth celebrating!”
Ross raised his glass. “Let’s hope this is the last war we see in our lifetime.”
“You call that a toast?” Martok roared. “To a glorious victory!”
They drank, and grudgingly, after he got his toast, Martok offered a grudging shrug.
“Though,” he added, “I admit the cost was high.”
Sisko sipped his bloodwine, and gazed down to another level, where he saw Odo and Kira walking slowly together.
“And I don’t think we’re quite done paying it.”
* * *
“You’re coming to Vic’s tonight?”
“I will be there. But I will not dance.”
“Who’s asking?”
The conversation between Ezri and Worf was almost cute as Ben Sisko strode up behind them, feeling a little voyeuristic for having heard. He could only be so polite—he had Martok and Admiral Ross with him. Amazing that Worf hadn’t heard them approach, or that Ezri hadn’t just sensed their eyes on them.
Better not to embarrass them.
“Commander Worf,” he called, and they stopped to wait. “Can you spare a moment?”
Martok didn’t seem bothered by Ezri’s presence and boldly said, “We’ve been discussing your plans for the future.”
Worf looked at him, then at Ross. “I wasn’t aware I had plans.”
“Commander,” Ross took over, “how would you feel about being named Federation Ambassador to Kronos?”
Worf gawked at them, waiting for the punch line. At his side, Ezri contained a smile.
When nobody started laughing, Worf screwed up his resolve and announced, “I am not a diplomat.”
“And I am not a politician!” Martok shot back. “But sometimes fate plays cruel tricks on us. Come, Worf! Kronos needs you. And what’s more, I need you.”
Completely stunned, Worf turned to Ezri as Sisko bottled up his own grin and waited.