by Diane Carey
Winn crawled to her knees. The Kosst Amojan lay discarded a few steps from her.
“No … no … not you … it was supposed to be me!”
Disgust and terror ran through her body. Pah-wraith Dukat’s victorious smile bored into her mind. His eyes were the orbs of a demon.
“Did you really think,” he began slowly, “the Pah-wraiths would choose you to be their Emissary? They hate the Bajorans. All Bajorans.”
Encased in bitterness, Winn understood she had been used.
Pah-Dukat glared down at her with his red-ringed eyes.
“Soon the Pah-wraiths will burn across Bajor,” he said, “across the Celestial Temple, the Alpha Quadrant … can you picture it? A universe in flames! Burning brightly for all eternity! Can you see it? Can you see it? Burn … burn … burn!”
* * *
“Ben? Ben, what’s wrong? Ben?”
He had stopped dancing. He saw fire in his mind.
Kasidy took his hand, leaned before him, tried to bring him out of what he saw.
He would not come out of it.
“I understand now….”
His voice—but strange.
“Understand what?” Kasidy prodded nervously.
“What I have to do … what I was meant to do. Kas … I have to go.”
He heard his own words, and knew his life would never be the same, from this moment. A bizarre serenity came over him. This had been a long time coming. She would have to accept it.
“Go?” She followed him as he broke from the table. “Where? Ben, where are you going?”
“To Bajor. To the Fire Caves.”
“Right now? Can’t it wait until morning?”
She didn’t understand. She didn’t see what he saw.
“In the morning,” he told her, “it’ll be too late.”
Fear came into her eyes. “I’ll go with you!”
“No.”
Even through the flames in his mind he found the strength to turn and look at her. He owed her that, for after this night nothing would be the same. She would have to be strong. She had it in her to survive, to get through, to accept that …
“I have to do this alone,” he said.
CHAPTER
13
His head swam with fire through the whole voyage.
He was concentrating, steeling himself, preparing for what must come. His hands and legs tingled. Soon he would have no more use for this body. He did not answer the sensation, or even think about it after the first moments. He’d issued himself a priority-one phaser rifle and kept it on the copilot’s seat the whole way.
In his mind all he saw was the caverns. Already the smell of moist walls, steam, and the guttural snarl of volcanic action filled his nostrils and ears.
When he was finally beamed to the maw of the Fire Caves, his mind and soul were already inside. He walked inside, armed with his rifle, lit by his palm beacon.
“Dad….”
His son’s voice called to him from the walls, the cathedral ceiling that had no top, but only darkness.
“Jake?”
Ben Sisko felt the pull of his humanity as he turned to see his son standing among the stones.
“You’ve got to come back to the station with me.”
“How’d you get here?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jake claimed. “If you stay here, you’ll die.”
“He’s right, Ben,” Kasidy said.
Clasping his rifle, he swung around. She was there, standing by the wall on the other side of the cavern. She looked so peaceful, so beautiful … he hadn’t realized how lonely he had been since his wife—
“You’re not real,” he told her. “Neither one of you.”
Kasidy seemed hurt. “But what we’re saying is real.
“If you try to stop the Restoration,” Jake said, “you’ll be killed.”
“And you can’t defeat the Kosst Amojan,” Kassidy explained. “They’re too powerful.”
“Come home, Dad.” His son’s face crumpled with worry. “You don’t belong here! It’s not your fight!”
His wife—“We’re trying to help you!”
“No,” Sisko rejected. “You’re trying to make me doubt myself. I won’t let you.”
He turned his back on them as Jake held out a hand. “Dad, please!”
In his periphery, Kasidy’s face was tortured. “Ben … don’t.”
He moved on without them, turning his back on the two—no, three people he cared most about in the universe. Something bigger, more magnetic drew him forward, a purpose, a responsibility so powerful that he never hesitated another step.
“Their beloved Emissary … sent forth like an avenging angel to slay the demon.”
Who was that?
Sisko blinked his eyes. Burning sweat poured into them, snapping him back to his physical body with very real pain.
“Dukat….”
“The Prophets have sent me a gift!”
Moving forward toward the glowing form of the Cardassian, Sisko squared his shoulders. “I should’ve known the demon would be you.”
Dukat raised his arms. “Go on. Kill me if you can.”
Sisko raised his rifle, but before he could take aim, the weapon vaulted from his hands and dashed itself against the rocks. He hadn’t entirely expected that to work anyway.
“Come now, captain,” Dukat crowed, “you’ll have to do better than that.”
The Cardassian stretched out a hand, discharging an energy bolt with no weapon at all.
Sisko felt the hard zap and tried to relax as he was blown to the ground.
“This is too easy,” Dukat complained. “I want to savor the moment.”
Bruising quite humanly, Sisko climbed to his feet. The cobwebs of hypnotic awareness fled, leaving his head clear. He climbed back to the ledge where Dukat stood.
“That’s right,” the Cardassian tempted. “Come closer.”
Sisko willingly did that, determined to show Dukat that he had not ever and did not now scare Benjamin Sisko.
“Now bow to me.”
Ridiculous.
“I said … bow.”
A force of fury blew across the ledge, knocking Sisko to his knees. Didn’t count. Wasn’t voluntary.
He shook his head at Dukat. “You’re pathetic.”
“Am I? Then why are you the one on your knees?”
“First the Dominion,” Sisko began, “and now the Pah-wraiths. You sure know how to choose the losing side.”
His reward was a crass bolt of agony from the Cardassian. Somehow that was satisfying. Even in immortality Dukat was still a superficial guy and Sisko could get under his skin with a couple of insults.
“Benjamin, please,” Dukat began again. “We’ve known each other too long. And since this is the last time we’ll ever be together, let’s try to speak honestly. In the past, we’ve both had our share of victories and defeats, but now it’s time to resolve our differences and face the ultimate truth … the only truth: I’ve won and you’ve lost.”
Sisko looked up at him, leering fiercely, with a damnable satisfaction that wouldn’t go away.
Pah-wraith or not, Dukat was still Dukat, skin-deep and easy to prick.
“If you think,” Sisko challenged, “the Pah-wraiths are going to do any better than the Dominion, you’re sadly mistaken. They’re not going to conquer anything. Not Bajor, not the Celestial Temple, and certainly not the Alpha Quadrant.”
“And who’s going to stop us?”
“I am.”
“You? You can’t even stand up.”
“Then I’ll stop you!” A shriek of threat rose from ten feet away.
Sisko spun around to see Kai Winn—or a ragged phantom of her—rise out of the dust and steam, holding the Kosst Amojan text high over her head. She reared back to throw the book into the flaming cavern.
“Are you still here?” Dukat mused.
He raised his hand. The book rushed out of her grip and flew into his own
.
A tendril of bright energy, clearly not just another lick of flame, snaked out of the abyss, coiled around her body six times, a dozen time, then burst into searing electrical fire.
While it consumed her, Dukat clutched the book. “Farewell, Adami.”
In that last moment of snide vulnerability, between god and lowly creature, Sisko seized his chance. Whatever this creature was, the real Dukat was enjoying a last bit of crude pleasure. He had to be in there somewhere.
Sisko launched himself in a running tackle and thundered into Dukat’s all too solid form. Dukat was merely an obstacle. Sisko had aimed not at the Cardassian, but in his mind and with his body he had aimed at the cavern beyond, like a high-diver charging off a cliff in some tropical paradise. Paradise would come, he could reach it, and he wasn’t about to leave Dukat behind to plague the natural worlds Sisko had so long protected.
Together, their forms wheeled and turned through the skyscraper-high flames, down, down into the endless depths of the Fire Caves. White limbo wrapped around them….
Cool mist cradled his sweating face, taking his body in its gentle fingers and rocking him as if in a hammock. He heard his own heartbeat, the breathing of his lungs. Sweet, cool air, moist with fresh rain, drew into his lungs and spread its droplets on his face. No more fire. No more burning.
“Sarah?”
He felt her presence, and many others.
“Are you there?” he asked her. “What happened?”
“Congratulations, my son. The Emissary has completed his task.”
“But the Pah-wraiths?”
“You’ve returned them to their prison within the Fire Caves.”
“The book. It was the key, wasn’t it?”
“To a door that can never again be opened.”
“And Dukat? Is he dead?”
“He is where he belongs. With the Pah-wraiths. Your time of trial has ended. You may rest.”
“I will … as soon as I get back to Deep Space Nine….”
“You won’t be going back there, Benjamin. Your corporeal existence is over”
He heard his own voice now as an echo, not as sound. He said something else, but there was only music.
Before him, the mist took shape. Many other Prophets gave him the gift of belonging. There, within reach of his mile-long arms, they took the forms he wanted to be near. Kira, Worf, Ezri … Martok, Ross … Odo, Bashir …
And his mother. He saw her as Kasidy and as Jake, and with them the child of the future.
She spoke to him in a voice like harp strings.
“You are one of us now.”
CHAPTER
14
“A sea of Changelings….”
The whole planet seemed wrapped in gold. Not the yellow gold of a child’s crayon nor the jaundice of envy, but the deep chamois gold that artists dream to make, milky melted honey with that oily slick that makes it soft … and there was a whole ocean of it.
How many souls rolled and surged out there? How many people was she seeing in this seemingly uninhabited expanse? Was there one to a bucketful? One to a droplet? She couldn’t begin to judge.
This was the most alien of alien worlds, and Kira Nerys could not even begin to imagine how it would be to live out there.
And she could stand here on this atoll for the rest of her life and all other conceivable lifetimes, and still never be part of that civilization. They would have to change to an unnatural state in order to accept her, and that would be unfair.
She would not stay here and tempt them to embrace a person who had no business wanting to stay. She had nothing in common with them physically and—far more importantly—nothing in common with them morally either.
Why was she so peaceful at the idea of Odo’s staying here with these million or billion strangers? He wasn’t one of them, not really. They weren’t “his” people. They just looked like him. They loved each other, and she was losing him—yet she embraced with a strange passivity that this was the goal he had been seeking so stressfully all the time they’d known each other.
Odo had always been a man out of place. He’d been here before, though, and knew this wasn’t his place. He could’ve stayed the other times he met the Link. These weren’t really his people, not by the heart, by the cause, or by the spirit.
He wasn’t staying for these Changelings. He was staying for himself, and for the Alpha Quadrant. His personal generosity and sense of right and wrong would keep him content here, for he had a purpose here like none other he had ever faced on Deep Space Nine. He had a reason.
He thinks I don’t know why he’s coming back to them. I’ll let him keep his secret. I won’t make him explain. Nobility shouldn’t have to comfort its own sacrifice.
The gelatinous golden ocean, rolling beneath a golden sky, provided a romantic backdrop for their final moments. Somehow Kira had no inner turmoil, which surprised her. Being strong … she’d expected it to be harder.
He was so happy, though, standing at her side, gazing out at those other creatures without the slightest selfconsciousness at his solid condition or the life he had led as a solid. She was happy too.
“I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful,” she told him.
Odo indulged in an all-too-solid sigh. “It is, isn’t it? You know, Nerys, I am going to miss them all … the captain, Chief O’Brien, Dr. Bashir … Worf, Dax….”
“And Quark?” She grinned up at him.
He grinned. “And Quark.” He turned to her now, and looked into her eyes. “But most of all—”
“I know.” She pressed her hand to his lips.
They drifted into a kiss, long and heartfelt, a full escapade not into passion, but compassion. They were sharing, not adoring, not craving, saying the last things they couldn’t really think of in words.
They were being watched, of course. What would the Changelings learn from them in this minute? Hopefully, the one thing they couldn’t have between them, no matter how much they merged and read each others’ minds—unconditional trust.
When Kira broke back from him, he was “wearing” a full dress-black tuxedo with a satin bow tie in place of his pretended uniform.
She laughed. “What’s that for?”
“You always said I looked good in a tuxedo.”
“You do!”
“Then that’s how I want you to remember me.”
She smiled again and straightened his bow tie. In a way, she really was sending him off to the prom of a lifetime, where he would be the center of attention and all would listen to his proclamations. He would give them no alternative, she knew. His resolve fairly pulsed with a supreme self-confidence she had never witnessed in him before.
It was contagious.
“I’ll remember this moment for ever,” she offered. “I’ll remember all our moments.”
“As will I.”
Oh, he was getting uneasy. Time to break off.
“Goodbye, Nerys,” he told her, probably sensing the same sudden urgency.
She squeezed his hand. “Goodbye, Odo.”
Wisely, he simply turned and strode into the mercurial sea. As the searching tide of his fellow Changelings lapped at his knees, he turned and waved one last time.
As Kira waved her own hand, before she lowered it, Odo released his humanoid form and melted into the golden sea.
She stood alone on the atoll, but not alone at all.
* * *
Kasidy Sisko sat on the couch in the quarters she had shared with her husband and knew that things had changed irrevocably. The room, normally so sprawling and empty, was filled with friends and colleagues who desperately wanted answers. In fact, they were rather more desperate than she was. She already had part of the answer they were seeking. She knew this was a turning point.
“Thanks, Jake,” she murmured, “but I’m not hungry.”
Jake Sisko had hovered over her for hours now, bringing her tea, now a tray of food, muttering hopeless reassurances, promises, and vows to search
endlessly, suffering the troubles of a young man who really hadn’t experienced much of the vagaries of life in space. He had always been safe, living his life pretty much on this station, protected by those around him.
Kasidy was a space captain. She knew better. She knew this feeling of dread, an instinct laden deep within on her long tour of merchant duty. Some losses couldn’t be grabbed back.
She had that feeling now.
“You need the nourishment.”
Dr. Bashir.
She looked up at him from her couch. His sympathy was very moving.
“Those are doctor’s orders,” he added with a pathetic attempt at a smile.
“Something’s happened to Ben,” she said. Everyone in the room turned at that one. They stopped pacing, quit moving, quit talking, and simply held still in that terrible realization that this was something they couldn’t fix, despite all their combined ability and technology—or the wonders of modern anything.
“I can feel it,” she added. “Something bad….”
Ezri came and sat beside her. “We don’t know that for sure,” she offered weakly.
“We’ve searched all through the Fire Caves,” Worf spoke up, his frustration like all his other emotions, right on top for all to see. “There’s no sign of him.”
“Here,” Julian Bashir appeared at her side again with a hot mug. “Tarkalian tea. Very soothing.”
“Better keep it coming,” Ezri quietly told him.
Jake was confronting Worf. “You’re not calling off the search are you?”
“Not until we find your father.”
“What about the Kendra Province?” Jake suggested. His desperation also showed, but had reached neither a peak nor the resignation Kasidy already felt. “Where he bought all that land … maybe he went there for some reason.”
“Colonel Kira and Chief O’Brien have just completely another scan of the planet. As far as they can tell … he’s not there.”
“But his runabout!” Jake protested, swinging to O’Brien. “You said you found it orbiting the planet!”
Poor O’Brien, standing there helpless, gazing into the fearful eyes of the captain’s son—“I wish I had an explanation….”
“We will keep looking for the captain,” Worf filled in when the engineer faltered. “I promise you that.”