Odo followed, after taking one long last look into the oversized specimen compartment. He didn’t know if he saw a Changeling, or a link of Changelings. He didn’t know if it was a shape-shifter of any kind. He only knew that he felt excitement about the prospect of finding out.
He had been looking for more of his people for a long time.
III
Ash
25
“We are here.”
Iliana Ghemor transmitted her message to the entirety of the Ascendant armada on the heels of the course correction she had earlier sent. Her simple statement provided an answer to the queries that had come in when one Quester after another had realized that the new heading would take them not past the star system ahead, but into it. They all wanted to know why, their interest clearly more than idle curiosity. They did not at that time need to renew their sustenance or fuel, they never sought rest and relaxation. They had only one reason to enter a star system: to purge the universe of another heretical blight. That is, they had only one reason, unless . . .
Ghemor had been able to hear the Ascendants’ emotions even in their musical speech: curiosity, yes, and anxiety, but in most cases, anticipation and excitement. Many interpreted their sacred writings to mean that they would find the entrance to the Fortress of the True within a solar system. The course change therefore raised the question in their minds, and they had posed it to her: Are we here?
Ghemor answered them in her role as the Fire: “We are here.”
In the narrow cockpit of Grand Archquester Votiq’s ship, she watched on the display before her as navigational sensors showed the Ascendant armada approaching the Idran system and, within it, she knew, the Bajoran wormhole. Scores of days had passed since she had begun the final leg of her journey, a mere trice when measured against the years and years of her suffering. She would at last find peace—once she had seen her vengeance realized.
Aboard Votiq’s vessel, Ghemor would lead the Ascendant forces to the threshold of the wormhole. She had already forecast its opening to them as the gates of the Fortress of the True being thrown wide. When the great subspace bridge unfolded in its swirling maelstrom of blue and white light, the spectacle would send the Ascendants into paroxysms of awe. They would follow her into the wormhole, and then through it, into the Alpha Quadrant.
Ghemor knew that Bajor’s Prophets would not stop her or her armada. They had spoken to her once, and after recognizing her as the Fire, they had sent her to the gathering of the Ascendants. They knew that Ghemor had her role to play, and her destiny to achieve. She would not be denied—and if anybody tried to do so, she would burn them down, be they person or Prophet. With not just an arsenal, but a metaweapon at her disposal, she possessed the means.
Once through the wormhole, the Ascendants would find themselves not before the Unnameable, but in the Bajoran system. During the voyage, Ghemor had already preached to her followers that they might have one more act to perform for their gods, one final sacrament before being held in judgment. She would lead the Ascendants to Bajor and have them unleash fire upon its surface, laying waste to its populace. Once the annihilation had begun, Ghemor would travel to Deep Space 9 and confront Kira Nerys with a terrible truth: that the responsibility for the obliteration of the Bajoran people fell at the captain’s feet. The Fire—once and again a Cardassian, for too long a Bajoran—would revel in the agony that would burn through Kira. In the end, the woman to blame for all of Ghemor’s misery would plead for her own death.
As the navigational display showed the armada nearing the star system, a tone rang out, a signal Ghemor had come to know as indication of an incoming transmission. The Grand Archquester toggled a switch on his control panel, and the voice of another Ascendant filled the cockpit. Ghemor recognized the musical speech of an Archquester, Seltiq, even before she identified herself. The Ascendant, the next eldest after Votiq, noted that the armada had entered a region of the galaxy that had not long ago shifted location, and that the system ahead matched the configuration of the historical home of the blasphemous Eav’oq.
Back before she had fallen into the wormhole, Ghemor had learned about Idran. She saw a report about the entire star system moving more than three light-years in a flash, to encompass the Gamma Quadrant terminus of the Bajoran wormhole. She had utilized that information to navigate for the Ascendant armada.
Ghemor had also read of the Eav’oq and their reemergence. During the gathering of the Ascendants, she had heard talk about them, about how the last few of their number had long ago escaped a crusade and gone into hiding. She also heard rumors that, after millennia, the heretics might have returned.
As the Ascendant armada entered the system, Votiq received a message from one knight reporting that he had just encountered a communications relay floating in space, which he had immediately destroyed. More and more transmissions of a different sort followed, all of them referencing Idran and the Eav’oq. When their ships drew close enough to scan the fourth planet, they detected a single city on its surface, populated by a thousand or so life-forms. It took virtually no time for Ascendants across the armada to conclude that the Eav’oq had indeed returned from their self-imposed exile. Calls rang out in the Grand Archquester’s ship for the immediate destruction of the city.
Votiq looked to the Fire for guidance. Ghemor wanted only to go on, to reach the wormhole and then Bajor, and to launch the attack that would avenge her. She considered telling the Grand Archquester to order the armada to bypass Idran IV and the Eav’oq, but how could she? On the brink of the Fortress of the True, the Ascendants wanted to do as she had suggested: to take one last action to demonstrate their worthiness to be judged by the True. In message after message to Votiq, Ghemor could hear the consensus of Questers and Archquesters that they must expunge the blasphemy of the Eav’oq, who poisoned the universe with their contemptible faith. If she tried to stop them, she feared that, even with her status as the Fire, she might jeopardize her control of the zealots before she could use them to exact her retribution on the Bajorans and Kira.
Among the many voices reaching out to the Grand Archquester, Ghemor heard Aniq’s join the chorus. “We must spill Eav’oq blood until all their bodies have been emptied,” the young knight proclaimed. Her voice contained no anger, but it emerged from the comm system in Votiq’s ship tainted by a quality far more dangerous and unpredictable: religious fervor.
Fearing that she could lose the asset she most valued, Ghemor operated the communications console to isolate a channel to Aniq’s ship. “Aniq, this is the Fire. You wish to punish the Eav’oq for their vile heresy.”
“I do,” Aniq said.
“And do you wish to lead the effort?”
“Yes!” To Ghemor, Aniq’s passion sounded just shy of madness.
“It is but one city,” Ghemor said. “Take ten ships. Leave nothing of the Eav’oq but ashes.”
“I will do my duty,” Aniq said.
“Do not use the metaweapon,” Ghemor told her. “It is not necessary.” She concentrated on maintaining the air of command, as well as a sense of pragmatism, in her voice. So close to her goal, it would not do to lose control. “Bring it to the Grand Archquester’s ship so that we may keep it safe during the course of your attack.”
“So says the Fire,” Aniq said, “and so shall I do.”
Ghemor closed the channel, then checked the sensor readouts. Throughout their journey, she had kept watch on Aniq’s ship and the valuable cargo it towed. She observed as Aniq broke formation from the ranks, and as other ships joined it. For a terrible moment, Ghemor thought that the squadron of ten vessels would turn at once for the planet, but then she saw Aniq’s ship altering course.
Moments later, the young knight contacted the Grand Archquester to say that her vessel had arrived beside his. Votiq activated a tractor beam and took possession of the metaweapon. Aniq departed, the lead ship of the ten that would a
ssault the lone city on Idran IV.
From what she had learned of the Eav’oq, Ghemor expected that the squadron would not require much time to achieve their goal—and if they did, Ascendants on thousands of other vessels stood prepared to back them up. It would therefore not be long before they continued their journey. Although the Ascendants might be disturbed when they emerged from the wormhole without having been judged by their gods, Ghemor realized that she would be able to utilize their desire to eradicate heretics to her advantage. Ten ships attacking a single city of only a thousand would not fulfill the bloodlust of all the knights in the armada, and she would announce to them that it had not satisfied the True. When she offered them all of Bajor and its four billion heretics, they would descend on the planet in a frenzy of destruction.
In the cockpit of the Grand Archquester’s vessel, Ghemor smiled.
26
Lieutenant Prynn Tenmei soared above the rolling green expanses of Nanietta Bacco Park. Below, crewmates and civilians teemed in the beautiful surroundings. Some strolled along the paths that meandered through the grounds, some picnicked, some played. Here and there, Tenmei saw heads turned up in her direction, or somebody pointing toward her. Although some members of the Deep Space 9 crew enjoyed making use of the low-gravity envelopes that crowned the park, nobody spent as much time on the wing as she did. For her, the experience embodied the sort of visceral freedom that she had sought for most of her life. From skydiving to surfing, from BASE jumping to white-water rafting, she craved not just the exhilaration that speed delivered, but the sensation of leaving behind all encumbrances.
As Tenmei neared the circular edge of the park, she threw her left wing down, tipped her right one up, and sent herself into a banking turn. She loved the new wings, a gift that Quark had brought to her cabin the previous evening. At first, when she opened her door to find the barkeep standing there holding a large gift-wrapped box in his arms, she thought that he had come to give her a present himself, which she found not only unexpected, but strange. Her surprise and confusion must have shown on her face, because Quark hastily announced that he had been contracted to oversee the shipment of the package to DS9, and to deliver it to her.
“Who’s it from?” Tenmei had asked.
“The services were requested anonymously.”
Tenmei had squinted at Quark. “You accept packages from people without knowing their identity?”
“They paid up front, which is all I needed to know,” Quark had told her. “The package was inspected by customs when it arrived on the starbase, so you don’t have to worry about it being a bomb or anything like that.”
Tenmei had not considered that the box might contain something dangerous, and she’d wondered what it said about Quark that the possibility had occurred to him. She took the box from the Ferengi and nearly overbalanced when she did so. The package weighed far less than she’d expected. She set it down in the middle of the deck in the living area of her quarters and unwrapped it. She examined the exterior of the box, which contained no identifying markings and no shipping data. Tenmei supposed that Quark could have removed such information, or even repackaged the gift, but she suspected that it had actually made its way to DS9 through unusual channels.
When she’d opened the box, Tenmei had found a series of long, thin metal rods—some straight, some curved, each extremely light-weight and precision-engineered—as well as two rolls of a beautiful gossamer material. She unspooled the gossamer and saw immediately that they possessed a winglike shape. She searched the bottom of the box for assembly instructions and found them, but she also spotted a small envelope.
Tenmei had eagerly retrieved what she’d hoped would be a card from her unknown gift-giver. She tore the envelope open to find only an unsigned note inside that carried peculiar words of caution: DO NOT USE ABOVE KINGMAN RAPIDS. To anybody else, the warning would have seemed oddly specific, perhaps even cryptic, but Tenmei understood it at once. She recalled that she had been in a holosuite, enjoying a white-water rafting program that reproduced the Kingman River on Izar, when she had been interrupted by a friend asking her for a favor—a big favor. The note contained just the warning and nothing else, but the gift could only be a thank-you for what she had done for Sarina Douglas—and, by extension, for Doctor Bashir.
Down below, just to the right, the park’s lake rippled lightly in the gentle, manufactured breeze. Several people swam, she saw, while two men sat side by side on the bank, holding hands, their pant legs rolled up and their feet dangling in the water. She also noticed—
Sudden motion to her left startled Tenmei, and she whipped her head around in that direction. To her surprise, another flyer had joined her above the park. It shocked her even more to see that the person who had donned a pair of wings was Ro Laren. In the three months since Deep Space 9 had become fully operational, Tenmei had never known the captain to fly. She wondered if Ro had decided to try it as a means of coping with all that had happened on the starbase, and the tremendous responsibilities heaped upon her by having to oversee such a complex, heavily populated, and heavily visited facility.
Tenmei smiled at the captain. Ro nodded, then lifted her hands behind her back and kicked her legs up, sending her into a dive. She plummeted for only a moment before she contorted her body in a way too quick for Tenmei to make sense of, then swept upward in an arc, until she executed a vertical loop. The lieutenant felt her mouth drop open. She had yet to attempt such a maneuver.
After her impressive aerial display, the captain headed for the nearest of the four designated landing zones, where the low-gravity field above the park reached all the way to the ground. She landed gently. Tenmei followed, alighting just after Ro.
“Wow,” Tenmei said as the captain began detaching her wings. “I thought I was the best flyer on Deep Space Nine, Captain, but that was quite something.”
“Thank you,” Ro said. “I thought that might get your attention.”
“You got my attention and my admiration,” Tenmei said, shrugging out of her own wings. “You moved so quickly, I couldn’t even see how you did what you did. When have you had time to practice that?”
“Practice?” Ro said with a smile. “I haven’t done that in years, since a visit I made to Izar’s Shroud.”
As the captain clapped her wings together and hoisted them easily onto one shoulder, Tenmei felt a twinge of anxiety. She had just been thinking of her holosuite program that re-created a setting on Izar. Was it mere coincidence that Ro had just mentioned the planet’s perpetually dark moon?
In her mind, Tenmei scoffed at her own paranoia. That wasn’t even that much of a coincidence.
“Something wrong?” Ro asked.
“No,” Tenmei said. “I’m just hoping that I can get you to teach me how to do that.”
“I’d be happy to,” Ro said. “I guess that’ll just depend on our schedules.”
Tenmei tilted her head to one side, confused, because both she and the captain worked alpha shift. Ro didn’t see her expression, though, because she had already begun walking away. Once more, Tenmei followed her, all the way to the exterior of the park and through the door that led to the officers’ lounge. By the time the lieutenant caught up to Ro, the captain had handed her wings over to the attendant, a Bajoran man named Devla Fol. Tenmei did the same, then tagged along after Ro across the lounge.
“Are you by any chance free tomorrow night, Captain?”
“At the moment, I have no plans,” Ro said. The statement did not sound entirely inviting.
The captain headed for the turbolift. Tenmei hesitated, thinking she might like to shower before leaving, but she hadn’t been flying in the park long enough even to work up a sweat. That made her realize that Ro must have flown for only a couple of minutes, otherwise Tenmei would have seen her. Still fascinated by the aerial feat the captain had accomplished, Tenmei entered the turbolift with her.
“Where are you headed?” Ro asked.
“Actually, that all just happened so quickly, I’m sort of mesmerized by it,” Tenmei said. “I was hoping that I could talk to you about your maneuver out there.”
“Of course,” Ro said, and then, to the turbolift, “Captain’s office.” The turbolift whirred into motion.
Tenmei had several immediate questions about how Ro had performed her acrobatic move, but before she could give voice to one, the captain asked, “How are your hands?”
“My hands?” Tenmei echoed, confused. “Do you mean from flying?” She held her hands out in front of her, palms up.
“No,” Ro said. “I mean from the injuries you sustained aboard the Defiant.”
Tenmei felt a jolt of anxiety rush through her. The captain had referred to the burns and abrasions to her hands that she’d suffered when the bottom half of her flight control console aboard Defiant had exploded. That had been two and a half months earlier, during the DS9 crew’s abortive pursuit of Doctor Bashir. It had also been the result of sabotage to the ship that Tenmei herself had perpetrated—the favor that she had done for Sarina Douglas.
“My hands are fine,” she said, holding them toward the captain so that she could see. Ro didn’t bother to look. “Doctor Boudreaux fixed me up that day.”
“That’s good,” Ro said. “A great deal of good resulted from Doctor Bashir’s ability to evade capture—not so much for Julian, but for the Andorians and the Federation.”
“I guess that’s true,” Tenmei said. She tried to mete out her words without betraying her caution. She couldn’t quite tell—and perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be able to tell—but she thought that Ro might be tacitly approving of what she’d done.
“It would have been a shame if all of that good had depended on you getting seriously hurt,” the captain said.
Tenmei shrugged with one shoulder. “Considering what ended up happening with the Andorians, it might have been worth it.” Tenmei had rigged the flight control console on Defiant in part for the sake of the Andorian people—Sarina had told her that Doctor Bashir had been on the verge of a breakthrough in resolving their reproductive crisis—but she had also done it for her friend. She had intended her sabotage to physically injure nobody but herself, but she had also taken pains to find the middle ground between making it look dangerous and making it genuinely dangerous. She’d expected to come away with wounds, but not untreatable wounds.
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