Over the next four days, Odo had done everything he had been able to think of to reach the shape-shifter. He adjusted the temperatures around the specimen, repeating patterns that suggested a form to take. He likewise employed sound in the same way, and light. He adjusted the flow of air around it. He used a portable holographic system to project images of various shapes above the specimen, and then of one shape transforming into another. He continually spoke to it, initially over the comm system, and then, just two days earlier, by entering the compartment with it—something that the scientists had not wanted him to do, but that he’d eventually been able to convince Doctor Norsa to allow him to try.
The day before, Odo had touched the specimen. With its metallic coloring, it looked rigid, but its surface gave beneath his touch—malleable, but returning to its original shape after he withdrew pressure. It did not feel inert or dead, but neither did it feel vital or alive.
Odo remembered when, more than a decade prior, a newly formed Changeling had been brought to Deep Space 9. At the time, Odo had been altered by the Founders, made to retain his humanoid form and unable to shape-shift. He attempted to communicate with the “infant,” and to teach it how to use its Changeling abilities—all without employing the harsh methods that Doctor Mora had utilized on him. It took time, but his methods eventually worked—though in vain, since the shape-shifter had been too sick to endure. In its dying moments, it integrated itself into Odo’s body, restoring his ability to alter his form—one of the greatest gifts he had ever been given.
At the time Odo had worked with the newly formed Changeling, he had wished that he could simply link with it, something the punishment meted out to him by the Founders had made impossible. Linking with the “infant” would have allowed him to pass on his knowledge virtually instantaneously, without the need for language and interpretation. After nearly a week of fruitless endeavors at Newton Outpost, the time had come for such a measure.
Odo completed his circuit of the compartment, and headed down the steps, along Corridor 4, and out of the foreign-objects storage section of the facility. He found Doctor Norsa in her office. She invited him to sit, and he did.
Norsa’s office, like most of the others he’d seen during his time at Newton Outpost, felt cluttered, although it really contained little in it. The scientist sat behind a large, sturdy metal desk on which both padds and paper printouts abounded, barely leaving room for a computer interface and a holophoto of her with her two adult sons. A pair of tall gray cabinets stood against one wall, presumably used for storing the padds and printed reports that couldn’t find a place on her desktop. Several large graphical displays covered the remaining wall space, themselves covered with images, lists, and formulae.
“Have you made any progress today, Odo?” Norsa asked.
“Only in my thinking,” Odo said. “I’ve tried everything I can possibly do to communicate with the specimen. That comes on the heels of you and the other scientists trying everything that you could do.”
“It often takes time to conceive an experiment,” Norsa said. “Just because we’ve exhausted all of the possibilities we’ve been able to think of to this point doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things we can try.”
“But to what end?” Odo asked. “Is there any procedure we can attempt that is substantively different from those we’ve already done?”
Norsa sighed. “I can appreciate your frustration—”
“No, I don’t think you can,” Odo said, interrupting her. “I spent years searching for my people, and when I finally found them, they went to war against the Federation and most of the Alpha Quadrant. I eventually returned to them after peace was established, but I have been separated from them again for years. Since being essentially stranded here in the Alpha Quadrant, I’ve spent most of my time searching for more of my kind—not just Founders, but members of the Hundred. I believe that this might be one of them.”
“I’ve read about the Hundred,” Norsa said.
“Then you might understand that they are unformed Changelings—shape-shifters who have never altered their shape. They need help. They need guidance. I want to provide that. I don’t want other Changelings to have to go through what I went through . . . to have so much time pass before they begin their lives.”
“I sympathize with your perspective, Odo.”
“And I empathize with a potential fellow being,” Odo said. “Imagine what it would be like if your children had been left on their own as soon as they’d been born. Try to imagine if that had happened to you.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Norsa told him. “And I understand why you’re saying it. You want to do more than you’ve already done. You want to attempt to link with the specimen.”
“I do,” Odo said. “Whether it’s a success or a failure, it will at least tell us definitively if we have a shape-shifter.”
“I can see that being true if you make contact with a living shape-shifter,” Norsa said, “but if you don’t, will we be able to conclude that it is not a shape-shifter?”
“If it is a shape-shifter but no longer alive,” Odo said, “I believe I will know that.”
Norsa stood up from her chair and stepped out from behind her desk. “Odo, in situations even remotely similar to this one, but involving humanoid scientists, I would probably deny you the permission you seek. But you’re a shape-shifter, so I don’t really know how to weigh the risks.” She sat down on the front edge of her desk and stared down at Odo. “I need to know, if you try this, what is the risk to you, to the specimen, and to this facility?”
Odo grunted. “I should probably lie to you and tell you that there’s no risk,” he said. ‘The truth is that I don’t know. If it is a living being suffering from a disease, or possibly even a being that died from a disease, I could be at risk of infection. Both of those possibilities seem unlikely to me because sensor scans have shown nothing like that. I am currently in good health and would not be a risk to a shape-shifter, nor would I intentionally inflict harm on it. If the object is not a shape-shifter, then I will not be able to link with it, and so I would be in no more danger than when I touched it yesterday. And I can’t imagine any danger at all to the outpost.”
Norsa folded her arms across her chest. “I want to say yes,” she told Odo, “but my number one concern has to be safety. You’ve convinced me, but would you be willing to make your case to the rest of the scientists working on the project?”
Odo stood up and faced Norsa. “I won’t enjoy it,” he said, “but if that’s what will get me closer to trying to link with this possible shape-shifter, then I’ll do it.”
ODO STOOD in one of the decontamination chambers serving the huge specimen compartment. Behind him, wearing hazard suits, stood Bruce Prestridge, one of the scientists on the project and a medical doctor, and T’Pret, a technician. Another technician, Endos Vinik, stood just outside decon, in the corridor.
Odo looked through the port in the inner door to where the great mass of the possible shape-shifter sprawled in its nebulous form. Across the compartment, several other scientists stared down through the viewing ports. Odo saw Doctor Norsa among them. She had not only agreed with him about the need to take the next step, she had also helped him make the case to the other scientists on the project. In the end, only two of the seven-member team objected.
“I’m ready,” Odo said, his words picked up and transmitted to the rest of the team via the combadge he had attached to his simulated uniform. In response, he heard feedback tones from a control panel. A moment later, the inner door cycled open.
Odo stepped into the compartment. He glanced back over his shoulder. As instructed and as he’d agreed, he waited until the door slid closed before proceeding.
Two strides forward took Odo to the stationary undulations of the steely form he had so hoped would be a Changeling, or at least a shape-shifter of some kind. His week at
Newton Outpost had dimmed that dream—so much so that his secondary goal had become proving just the opposite, that the Nova crew had not found a shape-shifter. Not that long before, Odo had decided that he had spent too much of his life waiting, and he had grown tired of it. If a shape-shifter lay before him, then he would try to communicate with it and help it; if not, then the time had come for him to move on. The Bajoran wormhole had reopened more than three months prior, and yet Kira had not reappeared. Odo needed to admit that she was dead, and so the time had come for him to return to the Dominion to see if anything had grown from the seeds that he had planted there.
Odo lowered himself to his knees and leaned forward. He brought his hands down on the smooth, curved surface of whatever the Nova crew had brought to Newton Outpost. Where he touched it, the substance gave beneath his fingers, but not much. He tried to feel a presence, to sense another mind, but as when he had first laid hands on the object, his intuition told him nothing.
Odo did not close his eyes, but his vision faded as he looked inward. In his mind, he envisioned circular motion, fluids whirling into vortices, water oscillating in tides. Within the spinning movements, he summoned his purpose and gave it the form of formlessness. He felt the fabric of his being ripple. His hands softened and then dissolved, losing their pale Bajoran complexion and quivering with a metallic golden-orange hue.
The moment had come. Odo separated the cells in the shimmering shapes that had once been his hands, widened the spaces between his constituent parts. Alive with the anticipation of contact, he pressed forward, urging himself to become one with the form before him.
Nothing happened.
Disappointment threatened to overwhelm Odo. Despite the lack of hard evidence that he would find a shape-shifter on Newton Outpost, he had dared to hope that he would. Worse, he had allowed himself to expect that he would.
And I believed that I would discover not just any shape-shifter, but a Changeling, he admitted to himself. And not just a Founder, but one of the Hundred.
Odo felt in that moment that he could liquefy into a sea of tears. He reprimanded himself for his sentimentality, to allow what he wished to color his assessment of reality. He wanted to leave as quickly as possible. He pulled his arms back, detaching from the specimen, and visualized his Bajoran hands, saw precisely the contours that they would take—
The substance in front of Odo swirled into motion. It moved with lightning speed, expanding and contracting, twisting and gyrating, forming into various shapes too quickly for his eyes to discern. He reached out as it surged upward against gravity, and then he saw a part of it descending toward him at speed.
Odo reached out, thinking only about connecting with the majestic form before him, linking with it. He waited for the physical contact, and for what would follow. But then the creature struck him, and his mind exploded in a burst of ghostly white.
Then everything went black.
NORSA STOOD in the corridor, peering through the observation port and down into the oversized compartment. It thrilled her to watch Odo set his hands down on the specimen and begin to change his form. She had seen recordings of shape-shifters altering their bodies, but never before had she been an eyewitness to it.
Norsa doubted that anything would come of Odo’s attempt to link with the specimen. It seemed almost certain that the Nova crew had not found something living. Her best hope came from the possibility that it had once been alive, and that Odo would somehow be able to determine that.
Even as Norsa thought that, though, she saw Odo pull away from the specimen. His outstretched limbs glistened at their ends, at what had once been his hands and presumably soon would be again. He settled back, apparently finished with—
The specimen moved so quickly that it took a moment for Norsa to make sense of what she saw. From the point at which Odo had made contact with it, it glistened with a silvery light, which spread across its surface in an instant. Directly in front of Odo, the specimen climbed upward. Norsa lost sight of Odo behind it, and then a part of it jutted out and formed into a shape consisting of right angles and flat sides, like an appendage that ended not in a hand, but in a humanoid-sized brick. It rushed down and forward, and then Norsa saw Odo flying through the air. He struck the wall with incredible force. His body flattened and splattered, losing its shape and becoming nothing but a mass of morphogenic fluid that slid down to the floor but did not re-form.
Norsa opened her mouth to yell out, even as she lunged for the control surface that connected to the alert system, which allowed scientists to signal an emergency to the entire outpost. Before she could utter a whole word, she saw a mass of motion headed in her direction. The specimen burst through the observation port—through all the observations ports—like a swollen river bursting a dam. Norsa saw her fellow scientists caught in the swift current of the flowing substance, and then she felt herself picked up and thrown backward. She heard a deafening crunch, and as her consciousness faded, she realized it had been the sound of her head striking the wall.
30
Cenn Desca sat alone at a table on the second level of Quark’s Public House, Café, Gaming Emporium, Holosuite Arcade, and Ferengi Embassy.
“Ferengi Embassy to Bajor,” he murmured to himself. He stared down at the gamblers crowding the poker games, the dabo wheel, and the dom-jot table, at the people drinking, at other patrons heading back to enjoy the holosuites, and he scoffed at it all. The disrespect shown to his people staggered him, though he did not find any of it a surprise. After the Cardassians had run roughshod over Bajor for half a century, after the Federation had moved in and taken over Terok Nor once the Resistance had finally repelled the Union, and after his people had given up their sovereignty to join the UFP, why should he expect something as simple as respect be accorded the Bajorans?
Cenn raised his stemmed glass to his mouth, but nothing reached his lips. He upended the goblet, and the merest trickle of springwine slipped onto his waiting tongue. He grabbed the long neck of the bottle, but he could already see that he had emptied it of its pale-blue contents. Irritated, he brought his hand down a little too hard onto the tabletop, and the glass rang out.
“You want to be careful with that, Colonel,” a voice said close to Cenn’s ear. “It’s Kaladrys Valley crystal.”
Cenn looked around to see Quark standing beside the table. He carried a circular tray before him, half-filled with empty glasses. Cenn reached over and set the empty bottle onto it, but he let go of it too soon and it toppled over, clattering among the other glassware.
“I would like another bottle of springwine, please,” Cenn told the barkeep.
“How about some Daronan spring water instead?”
“I didn’t ask for spring water,” Cenn said, annoyed by Quark’s resistance to his order. “I asked for springwine.”
“Yes, I know what I heard, Colonel,” Quark said, raising a hand to gesture toward one of his enormous ears. “But I’ve also heard from the captain that she will hold me personally responsible if any of her senior staff overindulge.”
Cenn glared at Quark. “I’m not overindulging,” he said, and then he turned away and looked back down at the bar. “Considering everything that’s happened, I’m indulging the appropriate amount.”
“Right,” Quark said. He reached over and plucked the colonel’s glass from the table. Cenn grabbed it back from him and set it down hard, his fingers holding it tightly.
“Springwine,” he said again.
With a grumble, the barkeep scampered away, toward the stairs that led down to the first level. Cenn gazed out toward the transparent shell that surrounded the Plaza. As always, numerous ships crowded about the starbase, some arriving, some departing, others docked or keeping station for the duration of their crew’s stay. He saw a civilian Cardassian vessel and just shook his head.
Out on the Plaza, past the half-wall that separated Quark’s from the wide main
walkway, a group of ritually attired Bajorans appeared. Cenn didn’t recognize the ranjens, prylars, and vedeks he saw, but he could not mistake the simply attired woman in their midst: Kai Pralon. He stood up and leaned on the railing that lined the second level of the bar.
“Liar!” he cried out, and the olio of sounds in Quark’s—voices, the whir of the dabo wheel, the chirps of the dom-jot table, the clink of glassware—diminished. Out on the Plaza, people stopped and turned in his direction, scanning the area for the source of the outburst. Cenn felt embarrassed to have drawn so much attention. He said nothing more, and as people resumed speaking again, it seemed that the moment would pass. But then the first officer pushed away from the railing and the glass in his hand—which he hadn’t even remembered he’d been carrying—slipped from his grip. Cenn lurched forward to try to catch it, but far too late. It tumbled down and struck the shelf behind the bar. It shattered, toppling several bottles.
The entire place quieted, eyes all around following the path of the glass upward, to where Cenn stood. Everyone stilled—almost everyone. The first officer saw one of Quark’s bouncers—a thick, broad-shouldered Filian named Aridesh—head for the stairs that led up to the second level. Out on the Plaza, Crewman Torvan moved toward the entrance to the bar, the security officer’s hand tapping at his combadge.
Cenn looked at the kai. He saw the people with her trying to hustle her away, even as she peered up at him. The first officer threw his finger out and pointed at her. ”Liar!” he bellowed again. “You lied to all of us!”
Cenn felt a hand on his elbow. “Colonel, maybe it’s time to call it a night.” The first officer spun so quickly that he nearly lost his balance, only steadying himself at the last instant by grabbing on to the railing. Quark stared up at him. The barkeep had set his tray down, and he held the palms of his hands out in front of him in a placatory gesture. “I’d be happy to have somebody escort you to your quarters.”
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