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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

CHAPTER

1

“Doctor Bashir. The time is oh-five-hundred.”

At least he wasn’t alone.

“Right….” Oh, how he hated the garlicky voice of that computer in the morning.

The light hurt his eyes.

“Julian … we have to get up.”

A much nicer voice. Julian Bashir shifted his arm to cuddle mode as Ezri Dax maneuvered herself closer. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“It’s a big day,” she told him. There was a faint dose of fearful anticipation in her voice. A week ago, he wouldn’t have noticed it, but things changed here every day lately.

“It was a big night,” he countered. “It cleared up a lot of questions.”

She turned her pixie-like face up to him. A childlike face, framed in boyish short-clipped black hair, a permanent flicker of uncertainty always passing through it.

“Such as?” she asked.

He brushed his hand along the trail of melanin spots on the side of her face, the subtle markings that identified her as one of the most elegantly unique creatures of the known galaxy. “How far those spots go down, for one thing.”

She smiled, but not without a sparkle of embarrassment. “I suppose you’re going to want to tell Miles.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you tell him everything?”

Without saying that today they’d all have other things on their minds, Bashir pushed away the rush of possible answers—she was right, he did tell Miles O’Brien everything—and how did she know that about the two men already? She was wrong, and he knew when things between a man and a woman, or a man and a Trill, or a somebody and a somebody else were better kept private.

Rather than blurting what he was thinking—my God, you’re so young!—he admitted, “True, but this time, I’ll make an exception.”

“Good,” Ezri murmured. She didn’t believe him, he was sure of that. “Now, we really should get up. We don’t want the Defiant leaving without us.”

“You know,” Bashir mentioned, “I’ve never gone into battle with someone I’ve slept with.”

She smiled. “There’s a first time for everything.”

Not making any move to get up, Bashir added, “Now that we’re finally together, it’d be a shame if anything happened to one of us.”

Another twist came into her expression, and she didn’t say any more, but Bashir picked up her thoughts as if he had suddenly become clairvoyant. She had been so lonely, so unsure of herself since having seven lifetimes of memories thrust upon her from another person, and another and another … her own identity had abruptly been put on hold, and she was now responsible for a cache of thoughts and knowledge that she hadn’t absorbed. Not all Trill prepared all their lives to have a squirmy receptacle thrust into their bodies and then take over their existence. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only Trill never to be prepared for joining. That made her very special.

Bashir tried to empathize, but how could he? He was one man, inside one body, with one lifetime to worry about. Yet he admired and pitied Ezri Dax in the same moment, and he questioned his own reasons for wanting the comfort of her touch in these troubled times in deep space.

“Let’s make a pact,” she said. “We both come home alive.”

A handshake—simple, but potent.

He took the hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

She smiled. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

No, no, this wouldn’t do. He leaned toward her, and she met his kiss thankfully, with welcome in her eyes. But then it was over, and before anything else could set in they had rolled out of bed on opposite sides and might as well have landed at opposite ends of a football field.

Ezri drew her uniform on very quickly, as if the blankets had been her protector and now she couldn’t be unprotected. And Bashir, ridiculously, had yanked on his trousers quite faster than usual—now how was that a way for a grown man and physician to behave? As if he were dressing in front of a … all right, she was very young, never mind that she was three hundred years old.

The medical wonder of Trilldom struck him again—certainly this girl was no three hundred years old, yet the eight accumulated lifetimes and those of eight hosts all stored within her unprepared mind reached back all those centuries, racking her with confusions he could only guess toward. Sixteen lives bottled up inside that girl over there, who yet was pitiful in her isolation.

As were they all, upon this turning wonder. As were they all….

* * *

“Miles! You’re late! You have to report in fifteen minutes.”

“Coming, dear.”

Oh, yes, the joy and fulfillment of having his family with him finally! If only there weren’t a war. Every beginning of watch was like this now—the laughter of his children, the humming of his wife, the clatter of family life—and he knew too well how quickly that paradise could crash and burn. He’d seen it before, the war coming out of nowhere to Deep Space Nine and rushing the station with all the complex agonies and strife caught up in those three little letters … w, a, r….

Thank the Lord the baby couldn’t spell yet. But Molly could, and she understood.

That caused pain to Miles O’Brien, as he stepped from his bedroom, pretending there was no care in the universe that could shatter him today. It was only for the children. He couldn’t fool Keiko.

“Now, remember,” he told his wife as she turned to him while feeding the baby, “Kirayoshi has his checkup tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred.”

She nodded, and he felt silly for having pretended she didn’t remember. By reminding her, he was also putting a spotlight on the fact that he wouldn’t be here tomorrow. He was leaving, and asking her to go on with family life as if nothing were wrong, nothing were happening.

“I’ve already confirmed the appointment with Nurse Bandee,” she said courageously. “One more bite….”

“And try to get some rest,” O’Brien pressed on, “and don’t stay up too late writing that paper on whatever those trees are called—”

“They’re called Arfillian blossoms and they’re not trees, they’re shrubs.”

He sighed. “All right … anyway, be sure to get some sleep and … oh, yeah, and—”

“Miles,” Keiko scolded gently, “stop worrying. We’re going to be fine.”

Fine, she said so easily. Back here on the station, trying to play house on the edge of a war zone, living in a pretty little cottage made of alien metal, just barely managing to keep out the inhospitableness of space with bulkheads that could be so easily ruptured by enemy fire. Just a few light-years from the front—was this a place to raise a family? He had thought being together would make up for all the risks, for the tortures of knowing where he would be for the coming days.

He’d been wrong.

“I know,” he said anyway, and leaned over for a kiss.

“Just you be careful,” Keiko told him.

“I always am—Molly, don’t touch that!”

His daughter recalled her hand just before it would’ve violated the sacred space around the model he and Bashir had so lovingly built. Then she realized her hand had come away with one of the miniature US Army soldiers. Quickly she reassigned the soldier within the Alamo walls.

Only as his little girl’s ivory hand dipped over the adobe stone partition did O’Brien realize how very large the model had grown. Now taking up a significant portion of the room, the Alamo seemed very real and consequential to him, its soldiers like shipmates. He and Julian had committed many hours to this historical problem of siege and conflict, supply and isolation. One needn’t be a scholar to see the symbolism, and how close he felt to those trapped men and women, struggling to hold out against impossible odds—

“I let you play with my toys,” Molly complained.

“It’s not a toy,” he insisted. “It’s a model.”

Keiko’s doll-like eyes teased him as she continued feeding the baby. “Then maybe it belongs in a museum.”

O’Brien glanced at her, suddenly embarrassed that the Alamo had sucked away such a large portion of their living quarters. Did seem to have taken over, didn’t it?

“I suppose I could give it to Julian….”

“Sounds good to me,” Keiko instantly said. “Speaking of Julian, have you told him about Starfleet’s offer yet?”

“I haven’t had time,” he stalled.

Molly wedged her way between them. “I knew it!”

O’Brien looked down. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’re not going back to Earth,” his daughter told him bluntly, “that’s what it means.”

“Of course we are,” O’Brien said to her. “Daddy’s going to teach at the Academy … as soon as the war’s over.”

Molly’s big brown eyes batted at him. “Then why haven’t you told Julian?”

As O’Brien groaned, Keiko smiled. “Out of the mouths of babes.”

Guilt grazed O’Brien’s sense of honor and duty. “I’ll tell him … when I think he’s ready to hear it.” To get himself out of this, he ducked down to kiss Kirayoshi’s plump little face. “I love you. Be a good boy, now. And you,” he said, turning again to Molly, “listen to Mommy while I’m gone.”

“I always listen to Mommy.”

As his daughter pranced away, Miles O’Brien found his wife in his arms, a rather more poignant gesture than his little girl’s farewell. He felt ghastly about Molly’s not knowing where he was going today, that this wasn’t an ordinary patrol or your average mission away from the station. Was she old enough to know the truth about where he was going? Should he pay her the respect of telling her? What did the men tell their daughters as they left for Normandy Beach? Protect them with soft deceptions, or give them the honor of knowing what their fathers were setting off to do? Tell them it was nothing, or that it was more important than anything ever before?

Should he spare the little girl, or should he think of the woman she would be someday, a woman who deserved to be proud, to remember a significant and poetic moment of farewell with her father, who might never return?

Why wasn’t he wise enough to know what to do?

Keiko held him tightly, not in a kind of goodbye, but in a kind of sorrowful pledge. Every parting was the last, just in case, and every kiss a promise.

“Just you be careful,” she murmured.

“I always am.”

He always said that, or something like that. An extra squeeze—the sure sign that he could no longer fool her or assure her away from the cold bitter truths of Starfleet service in these dangerous days. She knew too well how quickly, how permanently, things could change on, and around, and because of … Deep Space Nine.

* * *

“How’s that?”

“It’s doing wonders for my head. Except it’s my stomach that’s bothering me.”

“Well, if it helps, morning sickness usually ends after the first trimester.”

“That’s three months! I don’t think I’m going to make it!”

“You’ll make it.”

That’s an order.—

Oh, better not add that part. Still, it so often did the trick—once a commander, always a commander. Don’t say it, don’t say it….

Orders came much better from his low-pitched and decidedly unfeminine voice. How could he rumble out a comfort without sounding like a foghorn in the distance? He could no more make her feel better than create wind in space.

Always a commander, but it had been twenty-odd years since Benjamin Sisko had last become a father. Twenty very odd years, one might say. Tending a deep space station in upheaval, in a war zone, with cloaked enemies spinning around at arm’s length was nothing to tending a woman in the first grip of motherhood. He’d completely forgotten the whole idea, having had absolutely no plan of getting himself into this all over again.

Still, he found himself working too hard to press down a grin. Couldn’t let Kasidy think he was laughing at her discomfort. For her, this feeling represented no real live baby, not yet anyway, for she had never experienced the wonder of new life in her arms. For Kasidy Yates, this was little more than a recollection of spacesickness, so long ago conquered. For Ben Sisko, though, it was a tiny beacon of hope and joy in a very bleak void. He longed for the cry of his child, the wonderment in tiny searching eyes, and as any soldier understands, something more in his life to fight for instead of fight against.

She lay her head on his shoulder. “Promise me something, Ben,” she moaned. “Promise you’ll come back to us.”

“I promise.”

Yet they both knew the power of that promise wasn’t in his control.

Suddenly her eyes shot wide, her face flushed, and she bolted to her feet, rushing for the head like a phaser shot. The door panel slid open, barely fast enough, then hissed shut behind her in time to spare Sisko the joyous sounds of impending motherhood.

“I don’t believe it….” she said slowly.

“I said I promise,” he insisted.

“It’s not that—”

He wanted to help her, to change things on her behalf—but he’d learned long ago he couldn’t take a hit for anyone in his crew, and there were certainly things he couldn’t do for the woman he loved. Men since time immemorial had been unable to do much, no matter what technology they concocted for the advancement of life’s qualities.

Oh, well….

The main door chime spared his having to go over there and mutter comforting sounds into the bulkhead.

“Come in,” he called.

The door opened and his first claim to empathy wraithed in, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

“Glad I caught you.” Jake Sisko bumbled to the replicator, apparently thinking about coffee, then changed his mind and didn’t order anything. “I figured I’d walk you to the Defiant.”

Sisko stood up. “I’d like that.”

“How’s Kas?”

Through the bulkhead she answered for herself with a trumpeting moan.

“That answer your question?” Sisko said as the head panel opened again and the light of his life staggered back to the couch.

“Reports of my death,” Kasidy complained, “have been greatly exaggerated. But not by much.”

Jake frowned. “Isn’t there something you can take to make you feel better?”

Sisko shook his head and waved a quick hand, not wanting that subject opened up again. He’d been bitten often enough on that suggestion. “She doesn’t believe in taking medication unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

When Kasidy groaned again, Jake shook his head. “Sounds necessary to me….”

“If you’re going to go,” Kasidy snarled, “then go. Waiting for you to leave only makes me feel worse.”

Sisko moved to gaze down at her, determined by proximity if nothing else to show her that he was trying to be supportive. “You’re sure I can’t get you anything?”

But she was gone again—back to the head. Zoom. Hiss. Clack. Heave.

Despite his amusement, Sisko’s pride as he turned to his son got the better of him, and he grinned. “I think she’s sure.”

“Times like this,” Jake commented, “make me glad I’m a man.”

“Me too,” Sisko admitted as they went out the door side by side. “Damn it, now I feel guilty about it. Well, I suppose that Mother Nature in her wisdom put the better individuals in charge of … of …”

“The hard part?” Jake leered sidelong at him. “Are you saying men are wimps?”

“No, but I do feel bad lately.”

“About what?”

“Well … about getting a good night’s sleep, for one thing.”

“Why should that make you feel bad?”

“First of all, because it’s hard for Kasidy to get one. She keeps tossing and turning. And that excuse for a goodbye … she was doing everything she could to avoid a real goodbye. She thinks they’re bad luck.”

“She told you that?”

“Not in so many—”

“And what else?” Jake interrupted. “What’ve you got to feel guilty about? You’re in charge of a primary outpost in the middle of a center of action. Most military men would grovel to get a position like yours! All the news networks are constantly buzzing about activity at and around Deep Space Nine! The comings and goings, the ships in and out, the changes of control over areas of space around here—Dad, WTYX on Devona Four actually has a DS9 update twice a day!”

“Hm. There’s not that much news coming out of here, I hope,” Sisko drawled. “After all, we do have our strategic and tactical secrets to keep. There’s a limit to the ‘people’s right to know.’”

“I don’t think so,” Jake countered. “Freedom of the press is—”

“Not going to be the first topic of this day, of all days, thank you very much. I already tell you too much, if you get my meaning.”

“And I’ve put my position as the commander’s son before the people’s right to know. I understand the importance of secrecy too, you know.” Jake shrugged. “It’s still no reason to feel guilty. Getting a good night’s sleep, I mean.”

“That’s not really it,” Sisko admitted. “The station’s on constant alert status, permanent yellow alert, every Starfleet crewman required to be ready to report to battle stations in three minutes or less, and every one of us, including the illustrious commander, required to get rest on pain of siccing Dr. Bashir on you with a sedative. Did I give that order? What was I thinking?”

“You were thinking,” Jake said instantly, “that everyone in uniform on this station is just like you—wanting to stand three watches in a row because you can’t get work off your mind and you know the Dominion or the Jem’Hadar or the Cardassians or somebody’s going to come out of the darkness at us at any given time. And you also know that the longer the quiet, the louder the attack. You know they’re not just sitting out there quietly contemplating the stars. They’re building up for assault.”

Sisko drilled him with a glare. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody. I just know how you think.”

“Hm … that’s what I get for being such an open and forthcoming fellow.”

“Oh, brother.”

“Got myself into this,” Sisko miserated. “Now even I can’t come back to my office after my watch without breaking my own order and setting a bad example. And even today, of all days, I have to keep up a sense of order and not come out of that door one minute early. I’ve been up for two hours.”

“When everything breaks loose,” Jake said, “you’ll be glad your crew is rested.”

“I know, I know. But weeks of making every morning seem normal—it takes its own kind of toll. I see it in their faces. He nodded as two young officers passed by, offering their commander a curt good-morning. “They’re not fooled by the illusion of normalcy. It’s like we’re all lying to each other a little more every day, Jake. They know this can’t go on, but no one knows when it’ll break. The tension’s growing. I know how to fight a battle … but there’s nothing I can do to hurry an incoming tidal wave that I really hope never gets here. Here we are in the middle of a war, suffering from actually not having enough to do, hour by hour. It’s like the Alamo, waiting to be attacked, unable to prepare any more, and knowing it’s coming.”

“The Alamo,” Jake droned. “You’ve been listening to Miles and Julian, haven’t you?”

Sisko gazed down the long curve of the Promenade, and noticed that the clutter of activity wasn’t as noisy as usual. “The irony of their little project hasn’t been lost on me, let’s just admit.”

“It’s only their way of …”

“Coping, I know. That’s what I mean. They can’t do any more to get ready for what we have to face, and we have no idea when we’ll have to face the next wave. A war of intrigue is a lot harder to fight than a war of battles. Unfortunately, we’ve settled into the intrigue stage. There are fewer casualties, but the price is still high. We’re being eaten by millimeters instead of in gulps. Look at them, Jake … trying to live their lives as if nothing’s wrong. As if sector-wide communications blackouts happen every day.”

“They’re brave,” his son attempted as they passed the shops, rounding the bend toward Quark’s bar.

“They’re lying to themselves,” Sisko reminded. “And to each other. There’s nothing normal here, certainly not today. They can’t even write home to their relatives about it. We’re under a general alert—no private communiques, no advances to the news service, and not even a DS9 update. Not today, and maybe never again.”

He stopped walking, and took his son’s arm. “I don’t want you to see me off. I want to say goodbye right here.”

Jake seemed briefly insulted, then instantly knew better. “Why?”

Sisko paused. “Finally the Cardassians and the Jem’Hadar are going to have to face all of us—together—rather than just the Klingons in a single growly line. This is the kind of thing that makes history, Jake. I’d rather you remember me here, the way we lived together. Just in case history gets a little too personal.”

“Dad …”

Determined to keep this on a higher plane, Sisko reached for his son’s hand and clasped it firmly, but not tightly. “Take care of my family and my station. I’ll be back if I’m lucky, but dying doesn’t mean you lost. Understand? Don’t follow me.”

* * *

“You’re up early today.”

As Quark plunked a drink in front of him, Worf pretended it was an ordinary morning. The only other customer in the pub besides himself was Morn, over there in his giant slug mode, sitting alone as always, his big shapeless paw around a mug of klapri drippings.

Here at the bar, Worf stewed over his drink, but said only, “I am always up early.”

In his periphery he saw Quark lean closer, pretending he could keep a secret. “It’s a good day to die,” the Ferengi barkeep whispered.

Worf felt fury burn in his eyes. “Every day is a good day to die.”

“But some days are better,” Quark baited, “than others. Like today, for instance. The day the Federation-Klingon-Romulan Alliance launches its invasion of Cardassia. The final push in the long struggle to rid the Alpha Quadrant of the Dominion … and save my bar in the process.”

Though he fought to mask his anger, Worf knew his withholding was in itself a giveaway.

But how could the Ferengi know?

“Who told you that?” he demanded.

Quark nodded toward the mulchy figure of Morn. “He did.”

“Morn? And how does he know?”

“He’s friends with Admiral Ross. Or maybe Sisko told him while they were having dinner. I don’t know how he knows! He just knows.”

Worf slugged his drink. “I have to go.”

Without another glance at the clever and annoying Quark, Worf wheeled full about and beat it for the door. The gulp of bloodwine had galvanized him for what was to come, on this very important day they were all trying so hard to make appear ordinary. Yet his stomach rebelled as he headed for the airlock.

He was grateful for solitude, but in this proximity—a space station that seemed large upon approach and quickly showed itself for the small town it was—soon caved to Odo’s appearance.

The shapeshifter floated into being at Worf’s side before the Klingon had even noticed someone was walking with him.

“Mind if I walk with you, Commander?” Odo asked, as if reading his thoughts.

“Not at all,” Worf accepted. “Captain Sisko informed me you were joining us on our mission.” He paused, then offered a morsel of empathy. “I hope that when we reach Cardassia we find Colonel Kira alive and well.”

“So do I, Commander,” the shapeshifter said with unmasked fear. “So do I. Everyone’s taking the blackout with great courage,” he added. “I find it disconcerting—the waves are full of normal chatter, but it’s all a lie.”

“It is a tactical disguise. We have filled our communications channels with recordings. The enemy would notice a total blackout. Our assault would sacrifice its surprise, Constable.”

“Yes, but it’s surreal to monitor the channels and hear people talking whom I perfectly well know aren’t even on the station, and others whom I know are boarding ships to join the Allied Fleet. As the security officer, I still have to listen. It’s like … hearing ghosts.”

Worf winced, then hoped the constable was not watching at that instant. Ghosts haunted his every moment, the dead of his past constantly with him. His father, his shipmates, his fellow warriors, his wife—ghosts all.

Today they would create many more.

The two men fell to silence. It was a relief. Worf found himself instinctively leading the way, with Odo a step behind him, as they came through the airlock and boarded the muscular deep-space endurance battleship that had been the other half of their existence for so long.

* * *

The Defiant. Latest descendant of a line of proud fighting ships of the same name, leading back into the past of Starfleet, and even farther back to the planetary service from which Starfleet had grown. Not so graceful as a heavy cruiser nor so crude as a fighter, this new Defiant, like those before her, was something in the middle—built exclusively for the hard punches of close combat, without labs or comforts. The essence of minimalism and survival, she had more weaponry ordnance than any other provision, even more than food and engine power. She knew her purpose. Today she would fly her finest.

Ben Sisko stood on the upper level, surveying his bridge thoughtfully, absorbing the newness of this ship, the updates and fresh technology that his tough old ship hadn’t possessed. It was time to put some scratches in her hull. Finally, the allied powers would make a singular strike!

Months of preparation, secret coordinations, meetings, councils of war, spies, trickery, subterfuge—finally! An assault fleet was moving laterally across Deep Space Nine, gathering strength as it flowed, plucking grains of sand which it would soon fling at the enemy. Even now, before they’d left the docking pylon, Defiant’s forward screen bristled with a thousand ships passing by in loose coordination—Federation starships, Klingon cruisers, Romulan war wings, combat support tenders and picket ships, supply freighters and medical packets—vessels from all over the plagued quadrant swarmed together before him. A grain of sand is nothing, but together they make a mighty stone. But beneath his pride in this moment, Sisko feared where the crack might appear.

Oh, well, that was the adventure, wasn’t it?

Silently he counted the crew. Worf, O’Brien, Bashir, Ezri Dax, all at their posts. Nog at the helm, Odo standing beside the command chair. They were pretending to be powering up the ship, but it was already powered up. They were waiting for him, really.

“All right, people,” he began. All eyes turned to him. “What do you say we end this war?”

O’Brien couldn’t quite muster a smile. “Sounds good to me.”

“To me too. I have something very important for you to keep in mind for the time to come. We’ve been out here at Deep Space Nine for many years, usually on our own, depending only on each other and no one else. We’ve become a family, and I appreciate that very much. Today something different is happening. We aren’t on our own anymore. We aren’t the spearhead of the final frontier. Today we have to do something even more important—we have to remember what it means to be part of a fleet, one of many. The goal isn’t to be heroes today. The goal is to be one strong muscle in a much bigger body. We have to work together with a lot of strangers to take back our quadrant. That’s not easy for people who’ve had to be pioneers as long as we have. We’re used to defending our own fort, all by ourselves. Today, that kind of spirit will not only get us killed but might ruin a good effort I’m counting on all of you to have the humility and courage to let others be the heroes for a change. We all think we have that in us, but when the moment comes, it’s hard to do. I know you’re all grownup enough to understand what I’m saying. Today, I want to be proud of you for something that might not make headlines. I promise you, though … it’ll matter.”

For a moment his words had no effect. Then he started to notice a subtle change. Worf’s posture eased a little. Odo gazed at him more kindly. Bashir was smiling. O’Brien closed his eyes briefly. Nog seemed less afraid. Ezri’s eyes shined with embarrassing affection, as if he’d given them a charm they could put in their pockets. Yes, they understood.

He drew a sustaining breath and stepped down to the command deck. Odo offered a nod of encouragement. Sisko almost paused, but managed not to. He couldn’t absorb—never had—the idea that by looking at Odo’s homogeneous face he was actually looking at the very face of the Dominion, the eyes of his enemy.

Without breaking stride he slid into his chair and swiveled to face the forward screen.

“Docking clamps released,” Nog reported, without waiting for an order.

“Ensign,” Sisko began, “I believe you know the way to Cardassia.”

The young Ferengi gingerly touched his helm. “If I get lost, I’ll just follow the ship in front of me.”

With a hum of confidence, the Defiant smoothly swam out toward the crowded spacelane. There she fell into formation with the largest combined invasion fleet ever amassed in the Alpha Quadrant.

And out there, far before them, the enemy would soon awaken.

CHAPTER

2

“She’s got a concussion. Look at that head wound.”

“Can’t you bind it up and save her?”

“She could be bleeding in the brain, Damar. We’ve got to get out. Ten minutes in the infirmary and she’ll be fine.”

“I’m glad you have the problem solved. Colonel! Don’t go to sleep. You may not wake up. Do you understand?”

Colonel Kira Nerys of the Bajoran Military Guard moaned and forced her eyes open. Her head swam and pounded from inside her skull. The side of her neck was wet.

“Am I bleeding?” she asked. “Because … it’s getting on my clothes. Garak, make me some new clothes.”

“Kira, can you see me?”

She blinked again, and saw—surprisingly clearly—the goofy face of Garak bending over her. Those wide buggy eyes, that funny flat mouth, and all that Cardassian gray snakeskin, like bathroom tiles. Yup, that was Garak.

“I see you fine,” she complained. “Where are we?”

“We’re trapped.” The other Cardassian—why was she lying around with so many Cardassians?—was dirty and covered with soot as he climbed a tallus of broken bricks and shattered wood and metal support bars. “The whole building has come down on us. We miscalculated the explosion.”

“I didn’t miscalculate anything,” Garak protested as he put a pad of wet cloth to the side of Kira’s head. “My fuses were perfect. It was your calculation of the escape route that failed us. We should’ve gone out from the north entrance, as I first suggested.”

“If you don’t come over here and help me lift these blocks, the south entrance will be your tomb.”

“You better go help him,” Kira told Garak. “I’ll be right over there in a minute, as soon as I sew my feet back on.”

“That’s right, Kira,” Garak told her soothingly. “You rest right here on this plank. Keep sewing your feet and don’t go to sleep. I’ll help our illustrious leader dig us out of the hole he’s gotten us into.”

Kira let her shoulders sink back against the slab of wood they had laid her on. This was a nasty place, some kind of basement room. They’d fallen right through the ceiling when the bomb went off. It was a good bomb, big enough to take out half a city block. Another ten minutes and BOOM….

Or had it already gone off?

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I remember the sound. Three buildings fell at the same time, and four more in a row afterward. We’re in the fourth one, isn’t that right?”

Across the room, Garak and Damar hefted the two-foot-long blocks of conglomerate and metal bars one at a time—it took both of them to lift a single block, and there were hundreds of blocks collapsed in the corridor … that was a corridor, wasn’t it? Oh, yes, there was the lintel. Neither of them responded to her question. Oh, they were busy.

“That’s all right,” she said. “You’re busy. Just keep working. I’ll sit here and paint a phaser.”

That was all they needed to get out—one phaser. No hand weapons, though. The Breen patrols would pick them up on scanners. Seemed so silly. Why couldn’t she just go out and talk to the Breen and tell them that she and her team of conspirators and saboteurs had work to do and couldn’t be bothered going to the brig and facing a firing squad. They’d understand.

“She’s going to die like this,” Garak said, straining as he pitched one of the blocks sideways. It splashed to the floor with a dull clunk. “She deserves better.”

“Everyone deserves better. Quit complaining. An invasion tomorrow, and we end up in a stone box underground.”

“I thought you said quit complaining.”

“You quit. I’ll say what I please.”

Damar was on top of the pile of bricks, up by the lintel, trying to stick his arm through to open air. Kira watched him for a few moments, fascinated by the action of his belt as it rode on his hips, and the way his boots scratched at the uneven mess he was standing on.

What a funny thing. Here they were, Garak of the Obsidian Order and Damar of the Cardassian Military, two important natives of this condemnable planet who had both turned against their planet and its allies—and they were dying like squirrels underground while the big invasion prepared itself light-years away, unable to get through ten feet of rocks.

Hah.

Kira laughed out loud, then winced when her head started hurting again. She should get up and go help them move the rocks so they could all get out of here and go invade something. She felt like taking over a province or subduing a fleet.

Of course, standing up would help.

Nope, couldn’t do that. No feet.

Garak was coming toward her now. Wow, were his hands huge! They were two feet long! He could smother her with those!

“Your hands are big,” she commented as he probed her head.

“Just lie still,” Garak told her. “You’ve got a cracked skull. If you move, you’ll cause more bleeding. I have nothing with which to cauterize the wound. We should start bringing medikits with us on these raids.”

“You always were pampered,” Damar said, without turning for a caustic glance. “You enjoy comfort too much, Garak. It makes you weak. The Obsidian Order was perfect for you. Sneaking and hiding, never confronting your enemy except to lurk behind him and find some way to bring him down before he even knew you were there. Even here, in the midst of a resistance squadron, you want your tea and biscuits every day.”

“The Obsidian order, my primate friend, was the elite of the Cardassian intelligence network, feared and respected across the entire Alpha Quadrant, unlike, I should mention, the rest of Cardassia’s authorities.”

Garak’s musical tone betrayed an irritation that Kira recognized. Was he frightened? She couldn’t tell that much, but something was bothering him.

“Yes,” Damar droned, “and if you don’t elite yourself over here and lift some stones, you’re going to be respected very deeply. Ten meters deeply, I estimate.”

With a bitter glare, Garak said, “I’m tending to the Colonel’s injuries. I have to lift this board. Prop her up.”

“Why are you bothering to do that? We have to dig ourselves out of here.”

“Damar, that would be futile. Look at the size of those blocks. If we are still and patient, I’m sure that soon other members of the resistance will be along to dig us out. They’ve got scanners. They’ll be able to find our life-signs and get us out of here.”

“It wouldn’t be wise to wait, Garak.”

“Why not?”

“Primarily because the room is filling with water. Obviously the blast broke an alluvial line under the buildings.”

Garak turned and gawked down at the floor.

Water? Oh, yes. Kira let her hand slip from her side, and it fell into icy liquid swirling just below the thing she was lying on. That felt good. She liked cold water. Bracing!

“Maybe we can swim out,” she said. “We can build a raft and float out. I can knit some oars. Give me a couple of minutes. You want yours pink or brown?”

“If we don’t escape, Garak,” Damar said sharply, “then you would be better doing the merciful thing.”

Turning away from Kira, Garak glared fiercely. “Are you serious? What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting you stop tending her and let her slip into a coma, rather than tend her until she’s conscious just so she can be aware that we’re about to drown or have the rest of this building fall in upon us.”

“She can hear you, fool!”

“She’s unconscious, Garak. Look at her. Her eyes are glazed over.”

“At least they’re open. I’ll take care of her. She isn’t your concern.”

“Get back here and help me! If we’re going to get out, you’ve got to lift some of these blocks.”

“Very well, but if you mention—what you just said again, I’ll—”

“Yes, I’m sure you’ll throttle me with a crumpet. Get over here.”

Kira listened with amusement at their argument. They thought she was dead, and really she was just lying here painting and knitting and sewing her feet on.

“Oh, look,” she said. “A rat.”

They didn’t pay any attention. Over there, climbing out of a metal pipe, was a little northern provincial redrat. The redrat bobbed its pointy head up and down, surveying the rising water that was draining into their cavity. As it paused at the mouth of its little pipe, more water began to flow out of the pipe, preventing the rat from going back up the way it had come. Desperate and confused, it clawed around the mouth of the pipe, trying to climb the metal, but there was no way to do it. Frantic, the rat scratched furiously, then fell two feet to a jagged ledge of broken rock. From there, it scurried down a single metal rod, then jumped onto the end of the wooden slab upon which Kira lay, near her knee.

“It’s going to bite me,” she mentioned.

Garak ignored her. He was back over there, accepting chunks of conglomerate from Damar and pitching them aside.

“Have you noticed that wherever you go in the whole galaxy, no matter what kind of planet you’re on,” she muttered, “there are some kind of rodents? You’re everywhere. I mean, some of you have different colors or extra feet, or hair that looks more like feathers, but you’re all rodents. There’s got to be something evolutionarily inevitable about rodents. There’s not that much difference. Look at you, for instance. You’re bright red, and you’ve got the prettiest blue eyes. Blue? Look at me! … I’m right, they’re blue. And you don’t have a tail. All the other rats I’ve seen have tails. There must be some predator on Cardassia that catches prey by the tail, so you evolved away your tail and that way it’s harder to catch you. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

The rat raised its snout and sniffed around, standing up on its little feet and grasping with its tiny pink hands at Kira’s kneecap while it had a look around. As the water rose beside her, Kira watched the redrat waddle up along her thigh to her resting hand. It sniffed her hand.

“Don’t bite me,” she told it. “I don’t want to knock you into the water. Truce, all right?”

The rat didn’t bite her. Instead it climbed onto her hand and moved hesitantly up her arm to sit just south of her elbow. It looked around again, sniffing furiously, hearing the rush of incoming water. The water was up around Kira’s ankles now, making its way toward her knees.

“Here,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

Summoning all her strength, concentrating hard, she flexed the fingers of her right hand. Her thumb had no feeling, but her wrist moved. Closing one eye with determination, she raised her entire right arm as if it were already floating. The rat rose too, as Kira lifted her arm. Up, up, finally to a shelf of broken wood that looked as if it might have been a piece of furniture an hour ago.

“There you go,” she huffed, weakened by the effort. “Go on, get off.”

The rat made a single little jump, and landed on the jut of wood.

Kira’s arm slumped back to her side, falling partly over her body. “Better now?”

“Thank you,” the rat said. “What are you doing here?”

“We planted a bomb to harass a clutch of Breen patrols. We blew up their barracks. We got caught in our own explosion through. Miscalculated.”

“The fuse or the escape route?” it asked.

“Oh, well, that’s what those two were arguing about,” Kira explained. “They’re blaming each other for getting caught down here.”

“Do they argue much?”

“All the time. Just like they’re doing now. Listen.”

Kira gestured with her limp hand at Garak and Damar, who were now calf-deep in water even though they were standing on the slanted side of the collapsed pile of building conglomerate.

“All the potential glory of an empire, and this is what it comes to,” Garak was complaining. “Subservient to the prancing Founders and the insipid Vorta, and now we’re even lower than the Breen.”

“Look who’s talking,” Damar snarled back. “The Obsidian Order got thrown out because you spent so much time sneaking about, preparing for a conquest while never launching one, stabbing everyone in the back, trying to gain advantage, avoiding what you were preparing for. Eventually you ended up even stabbing each other in the back. While Cardassia was involved in stealth and suspicion, sneaking around, trying to be clever, trying to gain influence and loyalty, and gaining strength, the Klingons and Romulans and Federation were gaining territory. When you were finally ready, we were already surrounded. So much for the wonders of stealth.”

“We survived,” Garak argued, heaving another stone from the pile. “We prospered, our children were healthy—we were gaining power. Have you ever played that human game chess? Sometimes you can look at the board and still not really see who’s winning. But you wouldn’t understand that, Damar. You just count pieces.”

“How have we done under your way? Strutting and blustering—even when you can take an enemy by stealth, you announce to him you’re going to do it, and then you have to either completely expend yourself winning, or you lose. If it weren’t for the Klingons, you’d be the biggest fools in the galaxy!”

Damar smashed a stone hard into the water with a terrific splash that lanced them all with sharp cold droplets. “At least the galaxy knew we existed! We didn’t plan and plan and think and hide. We had a chance to win! We came closer than ever before! Yes, when you do something you have the chance to lose, but we won! Cardassia was in its heyday under us!”

“But you didn’t win! You got kicked out of Bajor,” Garak told him. “If the Dominion hadn’t come in and saved you, you would’ve been pushed back here to the home planet and locked in your rooms. And even the Dominion is only using Cardassia—”

“Look out!”

A deafening rumble tore through their basement room. Garak pulled Damar down from the sheet of tallus. Together they splashed into the rising water. Less than a second later, the whole wall of tallus erupted, pushed outward as if swelling, then crumbled and collapsed into a somewhat flatter heap of wreckage. Where the wall of blocks had been was now an obstacle of solid iron in a tangle of pipes.

“What is that!” Garak sputtered, coming up in an oily slick on the water.

“It’s a furnace boiler,” Damar bitterly said. “We must’ve loosened the floor under it.”

He swam to the enormous mass of iron and pressed against it with both hand. It budged not a centimeter.

“That’s the end of it. We can’t possibly move this. We’re finished unless they find us in the next few minutes.”

“Yes, well, if I were in a better mood I’d wring your neck before the water drowns you.” Garak paddled over to Kira’s plank, but there was nothing he could do for her. The water now lapped at her pelvis and she could feel the chill up her spine.

“They don’t like each other,” the rat observed, “do they?”

“Oh, there’s a certain commonality,” Kira explained. “They’re not all that different. Garak was on the political outside and Damar was on the political inside. If you ask me, under neither of them has Cardassia done particularly well.” She paused, and looked up at Garak as he plucked at the padding he’d placed on the side of her head. “It’s funny … what he said. If Martok and Worf were here, those words would be stuffed right back down Garak’s throat.”

“About the Klingons?”

As Garak and Damar split to opposite sides of the wreckage, seeking an alternative way out of their underground coffin, Kira raised herself to a sitting position with tremendous effort. This way she could read a long stick that looked like it might’ve been a chair leg. Now, if she lay back again, she could use her right hand—her left wouldn’t move at all—to raise the chair leg onto the crashed furniture where the rat was struggling along, flanked by lapping water.

“There. Climb a little higher,” she offered.

The rat thanked her again, turned its back, and scurried up the chair leg to the top of a cabinet. Its ruby red back glinted in the single electrical light that still worked.

A light? Until now, she hadn’t paid any attention to the fact that she could still see down here. She hoped the light stayed on. Suddenly the idea of darkness frightened her. She shivered.

“It’s getting cold,” she mentioned. “Don’t come down here again or you’ll get wet.”

“It’s nice of you to worry about me. That Cardassian seems to be worried about you.”

“Well,” Kira murmured, “I have to admit we’ve become friends over the years. Didn’t start out that way.”

“Is something wrong, Kira?” Garak slipped back into the water from where he’d been inspecting the upper wall. “Did you say something?”

“She’s been muttering all along,” Damar said from the other side. “She’s delirious.”

“I’m not delirious,” Kira told him. “I’m talking to the rat, not to you. You see,” she went on, “I wanted nothing more than to kill them both for a while there. Look at us now. Working together to try to get out of here before the rest of the block comes down on us.”

“Which one of them do you like better?”

Kira laughed. Only a rat would think like that.

“Well,” she began, “from my point of view, they’re both wrong. Look at Garak. He’s spent years on Deep Space Nine and he’s gotten to like the people there, but he still doesn’t realize that if he gains, someone else doesn’t necessarily lose. When something good is created, everyone gains! That’s why the Federation, without blustering, without threats, without conquering, just keeps moving along and getting bigger and better—and people want to join it.”

“Is that who you are? Federation?”

“I’m Bajoran. I’m just trapped here. Temporarily. And don’t forget it’s just temporary. I’m sure not staying on this Cardassian rock any longer than I absolutely have to. Sooner or later somebody’ll break through and get us all off. Until then, we’re working to break the Dominion’s hold on Cardassia. The Federation’ll be here eventually. That’s how it works.”

“Not by conquest?”

“Not unless it’s really provoked. It moves inexorably along and along, not forcing anybody to come in, and it just works better. If you push and take and just be a bully, eventually somebody’s going to stand up to you, you’re going to run into somebody bigger—or three people who are collectively bigger. The Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, Breen—even the Dominion—they spend all their time trying to figure out the best way to bully. That’s the only difference between Garak’s way and Damar’s. Should they bully by walking right up to someone and trying to hit him, or by sneaking up and punching him in the back? Eventually, neither way gets the best results. The Klingons figured that out, y’know, now that I think about it. They still strut around, and they like their facade of bullying, but they know that all those years of galactic snarling just brought them to poverty. Now they go along with the Federation. It’s about time. I wonder what’s taking the cook so long?”

She lay back again, exhausted. The air was stuffy and dusty, in spite of the water gushing in. Crumbs of broken rock, insulation, brick, and wood layered her clothing and made her mouth dry.

She wanted to drink some of the water crawling up her legs, but her hands wouldn’t form into a cup.

The rat climbed higher on the crushed furniture, ran to the edge to look over at the rising water, then sniffed around the perimeter. “I smell fresh air.”

Kira raised her aching head again. “What?”

“There’s air coming through this hole,” the rat said. “I don’t think the building is completely collapsed.”

“If it’s not, maybe there’s another way out!” Kira pushed herself up on an elbow.

“Kira, don’t move!” Garak called. “If you fall off that board, you’ll drown.”

“The rat found some fresh air. Garak, come over here! Damar!”

“What does she want, Garak?” Damar appeared around a slanted piece of ceiling material, swimming up to the shoulders.

“Something about fresh air,” the other Cardassian told him, and also paddled closer.

“I don’t blame her. It smells like dead gutfish in this sewer.”

“I wish it were a sewer,” Garak commented. “Then perhaps there would be a way out.”

“There is!” Kira insisted. “Look! The rat’s climbing through an opening up in that corner. Look. Well, look!”

“She’s pointing up there.”

Garak moved to Kira’s side and squinted into the corner where the rat had disappeared through a ragged hole near the ceiling.

“Damar, I see some light!” he exclaimed.

“Stay with her. I’ll go.”

As Kira sank back against Garak and he pulled her higher on the plank, they watched Damar pick his way up the strewn wreckage to the corner and peer into the nearly hidden hole. Drawing a breath through his nostrils, he proclaimed, “That is open air!”

“Can you see anything?” Garak called.

“I see light … I can see part of the street! There must be a room that hasn’t collapsed, and an outside wall that fell away! Hurry! Bring those steel bars and help me tear away this wall material!”

“There’s a hammer over there!”

Vigorously now, Garak splashed around Kira to the place he had seen a hammer, which would until now have been useless to them. He also gathered several reinforcement rods, then carefully made his way up the pile of furniture and crushed building wreckage to where Damar was already pulling at the wallboard.

“Stay awake, Colonel,” he called back to Kira. “We’ll have you out of here in a matter of minutes!”

Damar put his powerful shoulders into using a steel rod as a crowbar, causing part of the wall to rip like paper. The wall protested, making a terrible squawk, and for a moment Kira thought her friend the rat might have been stabbed.

“Don’t hurt him!” she called. “After all, he’s the one who found the fresh air.”

“Relax, Kira,” Garak insisted. “We’ll have you in the infirmary in no time. Our unit medic will cure you in a flash. By tonight you’ll be back to your old vigorous self, with a phaser in your hand and a gleam in your eye.”

“And you will be back in your nanny’s arms,” Damar commented, “sipping tea and having your feet massaged.”

Garak’s eyes gleamed. “Is that an offer I can count on? I never knew you could be so accommodating!”

“At least we’ll be free in time for the regional resistance meeting tonight,” Damar said, typically already thinking of what had to happen next. “We’ve got to convince them of our plan. If I have anything to do with it, we will wrest our planet from the fools who would collaborate with the Dominion.”

“If I recall correctly, not too long ago that was you doing the collaborating. Now look at you—you’re a Cardassian legend. The great Damar, who the Jem’Hadar thought they had killed, but who rose again out of the ashes of shame to destroy so many of the enemy and fire an entire rebellion on his home planet! You’re a born rebel, Damar. You just don’t know which side to be on at any given moment.”

“Look who’s talking,” Damar grumbled back.

Kira smiled. They didn’t really hate each other. Necessity had made them compatriots. Now they both knew what they wanted—the Dominion’s paws off their home planet.

Could be worse. She’d fought for the same thing. Except that her fight had been against the Cardassians.

Now she was fighting with them.

What a silly universe. Painted feet, talking rats, and Bajorans fighting alongside Cardassians. What unexpected leap would happen next?

Who said wars had to be bad? Look how much good this one had brought. She’d make friends of enemies. She was part of a whole planet’s finding out what it meant to have to fight for its identity.

“After all,” she said, “that’s all I wanted to teach the Cardassians all along. Maybe this time they’ll learn.”

“Hold on, Colonel,” Garak called as he and Damar tore the wall apart.

More and more outside air piled in through the hole they were making.

Of course, the water was up to her neck now. Whose bright idea was it to take a bath at a time like this?

“There aren’t even any bubbles. Garak, why didn’t you bring me bubbles?”

“Coming, I’m coming. Clear this away, Damar. You know your way around garbage, don’t you?”

“After long association with you, yes.”

Garak climbed back down in time to clasp Kira under the arms and haul her up out of the water. “You’ve lost weight,” he commented. “I’ll have to make you a whole new wardrobe.”

“That’s all right, Garak, perfectly all right,” she said, grinning as he hoisted her out of the cold wet basement. “I made six new suits while I was waiting for you. And some boots for my rat.

CHAPTER

3

If a planet could be beautiful, Cardassia Prime surely must be a jewel in the random night. Like a giant crystal ball, the planet seemed constantly to glitter in its subdued sun. Though he had been programmed with all necessary historical texts and the poetry that described them, Weyoun found himself still baffled by the romance with which many of the curious creatures in this quadrant seemed to speak of their homes. Yet he had come over the many weeks to see some of the attraction of Cardassia against the night.

The Dominion Briefing Room, set well below the equator of the planet he was here to defend, had many pictures of the planet from surveillance satellites and outposts on the moons. Weyoun broke from his communion with these monitors and went back to the one that counted. With enjoyable hatred he glared at the incoming swarm.

“Founder, the Federation invasion fleet has left Deep Space Nine. They’ll reach the Cardassian border in twelve hours.”

Seated at a desk near him, the glorious Founder was difficult to look at in these advanced stages of her disease. Her skin, once smooth as bisque soup, was now cracked and desiccated. She had no power to mask the advancement of the plague which was upon her and her people. The sight made Weyoun feel ill himself, though he fought to keep from glancing at her, to keep the disgust and horror from his voice. He knew her intelligence had not suffered—she would read his glance with all the cunning she had ever possessed.

Yet also it was a relief not to glance that way in order to avoid looking at the Breen general. Thot Pran was a sickening clod who was better ignored. The Breen were servicers, nothing more. Weyoun would tolerate them for now.

“Good,” the Founder quietly said. She had trouble forming words through her scabby lips, but turned to the Breen and added, “Our brave Jem’Hadar soldiers have a motto … ‘Victory is life.’”

The Breen answered her in his unintelligible static. His voice was nothing more than a crackle of electrical noise to Weyoun, but the Founder understood what was being said.

“I’m glad you’re familiar with it,” she said. “For today, those words have meaning for us all. I have no doubt,” she went on, speaking very slowly, and with trouble, “that the outcome of this battle will determine the outcome of the war. Either we destroy the Federation invasion force, or they destroy us. There are no other options.”

Weyoun overheard without looking, knowing he was not being spoken to, and yearned to rush to her, to extol the wonders of the Founders, the glory of the Dominion, to declare that nothing so petty could pull it down. As he clamped his lips tight, he listened to the static of the Breen general speaking in his barbaric manner.

“Fight well today,” the Founder told her minion, “and Romulus will be yours to do with as you please.”

How petty! Weyoun tightened his fists in disgust. To have to bribe the fools! To have to give them a planet just so they would defend the Dominion! Pathetic!

The Breen was buzzing again. He had better be groveling!

“Yes, yes,” the Founder said now. “And Earth too. I assure you, the pleasure is all mine.”

Apparently satisfied, if such a clod could be measured by body language, the Breen offered one more burst of sizzle, then went to a monitor and began clicking and snapping his troops into formation—at least that was what Weyoun assumed was going on.

Bribes! Giving away huge portions of their conquests to buffoons! Weyoun bottled his rage. He had no right to interrupt, yet a certain quiver of insult boiled up inside him.

His hands trembled. He pressed his lips tight. He glared at the screen in inconsolable fury.

“Is something bothering you?”

The Founder was looking at him again.

With monumental control Weyoun kept the contempt out of his voice.

“Apparently,” he said tightly, “I was under the mistaken impression that all Federation territories would fall under my jurisdiction … including Earth.”

The Founder lowered her voice. “And so they shall.”

He looked at her. “But you just promised the Breen….”

Was she smiling beneath the scales of disease?

“I’d promise the Breen the entire Alpha Quadrant,” she told him quietly, “if I thought it would help win this war.”

How fluidly she conjured the future! What a wonder she was! To think of so many things at once, to understand so much, to know when integrity served and when it stalled—

He bowed before her. “The Founder is wise in all things,” he murmured.

He was about to say something else, to elaborate on his opinion about this turn, but was cut off when Legate Broca came into the briefing room without even chiming the door notice.

“Founder,” he began rudely, “I’ve heard a disturbing rumor about the traitor Damar.”

The Founder did not look at him. “What about him?”

“He may be alive.”

Now she turned to Broca. “Is this possible?”

“I don’t see how,” Weyoun attempted. “We destroyed his ship, his rebel base—”

“But his body was never found.”

“They say he’s here,” Broca insisted, “on Cardassia Prime. Here in the capital, no less….”

Weyoun stiffened. Would she be angry? What action would she want him to take? The detested traitor Damar—Weyoun could think of many fates he would inflict upon a Cardassian who had turned on the wondrous Dominion, which had once again raised the Cardassians to power in the quadrant. How could he turn on the saviors of his people?

The Founder showed no outer emotion at this news. She seemed, for a moment, not to have heard Broca at all. Then she gave him a beautiful gift, charging him with authority that would resonate far.

“Look into this matter,” she said.

Broca nodded.

Weyoun narrowed his eyes. “If Damar is alive—”

Broca snapped him a bitter glare. “He won’t be for long.”

“I smell smoke. Musky … thin. A cookfire.”

“The Jem’Hadar don’t cook. They don’t eat either.”

“Shh.”

“It could be Cardassian, but it doesn’t smell familiar.”

“Don’t obsess, Garak. You’re letting hunger get the best of you. Keep quiet. For a spy, you make a terrible sneak. Follow me.”

The alley was dank and slippery with lichen embedded between the bricks in the broken floor. They had been hurrying through these back alleys for hours, hugging walls, avoiding the main streets, climbing over walls, through ducts, and under piping. This was a slow way to traverse a whole city, but the only way to avoid patrols. Garak was clumsy, too long separated from soldiering. He had forgotten how to be stealthy. Now they had to move into the main streets, for their maze of back alleys had come to a dead end.

As they rounded a cold-molded building and moved out of the protection of the alley, their good fortune instantly dissolved in a disruptor strike against the building that nearly took both their heads off.

“Halt!”

A Jem’Hadar voice. Familiar enough, by now.

And a light—a spotlight, struck the wall, bouncing to brighten this whole side of the street.

Two Jem’Hadar soldiers blocked their path, if the light were not creating illusions. Yes, two, with one holding a palm beacon.

“Step forward. Slowly.”

“At last!” Garak tentatively moved toward the two palefaced demons. “Some friendly faces! We’re new to the city and I’m afraid we’ve gotten lost—”

“Quiet!” the soldier on the left ordered.

Both soldiers stepped closer now, closing the distance between them.

The one who had spoken came farther forward by one step, and spoke again, but not to Garak.

“You are Legate Damar.”

Damar clamped his mouth shut, knowing his wide eyes had already given too much away. For what could he say?

Garak flopped his arms and shook his head and laughed. “You see? I told you you looked like him!” To the Jem’Hadar he attempted, “this isn’t the first time my cousin has been mistaken for that traitor—”

“He is Damar,” the unswayed Jem’Hadar insisted. “He will be taken to Dominion Headquarters. You,” it said then, looking at Garak, “will die here.”

Fear crossed Garak’s face as he apparently realized there was no way out of this. Damar’s mind ran with possibilities, though each one fell short. The Jem’Hadar’s weapon snapped up to Garak’s frightened eyes. The final seconds pulsed.

A crackle of animate noise burst through the street. Breen!

Over there—the Jem’Hadar turned his light down the street. A Breen soldier stood at the other end of the alley from which Damar and Garak had just come. Had they been followed the whole time?

It came forward now, chittering its staticky voice. If Damar were any judge, it had just repeated itself. Perhaps it wanted one of Garak’s arms to chew on. How could any of them possibly know?

“I do not understand you,” the Jem’Hadar called. “There must be a malfunction in your communication device.”

In answer, the Breen soldier halted, squared both legs, raised his weapon and quickly fired it. Damar threw himself to one side, driving Garak out of the line of fire. They reeled briefly in the blast wash, but they had not been in the line of fire at all! The two Jem’Hadar had been struck instead—dead, both of them! What a wonderful sight!

“Actually,” the Breen soldier said in perfect English, “I don’t speak Breen.”

It pulled off its helmet. But how could it breathe?

Ah—there was the answer. Kira’s short red hair ruffled in the fallen light, which still shined at a funny angle on the bricks. Her bright brown eyes were lit with irony and superiority. She knew she’d done well to anticipate this, and she was happy to lord it over them.

Actually, Damar was pleased—even for a moment—to have been proven imprudent. In that one instant, Kira had shown herself as the experience-hardened guerrilla fighter whose youth had been forged in the oven of resistance. Though it had been his own people—an empire he had once served—that had driven her and all her Bajoran people down for so very long, Damar found himself feeling respect for her quickness and foresight. He determined to learn from this, to be better next time—and every time after that.

With a gush of relief, Garak blurted, “I hope you don’t consider me ungrateful, but what are you doing here!”

“Watching your backs,” Kira told them, with something less than affection.

She looked healthy enough, but they all knew she was still recuperating from her head wound down in that collapsed building. For hours they had made her rest, but as soon as the medic announced that her subdural injury had been healed she had insisted upon getting up and going back to their collective job as terrorists. Now she had saved their lives.

“I thought we agreed,” Damar said, turning to her, “it would be safer if you stayed off the streets and out of sight.”

“That’s what the helmet’s for,” she told him. “You should be wearing one too. Every Jem’Hadar and Breen soldier on Cardassia is looking for you.”

“If I’m going to lead this revolt,” Damar protested, “I can’t do it hiding in a cellar. I had to attend tonight’s gathering.”

“It was a great success,” Garak lauded, still breathing a little too rapidly from his near encounter with unfriendly fire.

Kira gestured them off the street. “You can tell me the details later.” Kira put her helmet back on, gingerly because there was still some swelling on the side of her head. “If anyone asks, you’re my prisoners.”

Damar bristled, but Garak clasped him by both arms and pushed him forward. “We’re honored,” the other Cardassian said, and they were off.

They made their way this time not through the alleys of Cardassia’s capital city, but down the main streets, at gunpoint, courtesy of the clever Bajoran woman who had gained their respect over the years. Her versatility was to be lauded. Her bravery was a given. But bravery is expected of soldiers and Damar gave her no extra credit for that. He both admired and was jealous of her ability to foresee intrigue. He must learn to do that, so as never to be humiliated again. Perhaps carrying weapons would have been wiser, even with the chance of their being detected by energy scanners. He must learn better to judge risks against each other, or find ways, as the colonel had, to use the negatives of his situation in his favor. Pretending to be Breen had never occurred to him, yet now it seemed so simple….

They hurried back to their secret cellar without further incident, other than one quick pass beside the Cardassian patrols, who failed to notice them in the darkness. They saw no other Jem’Hadar, no other Breen. Not surprising, given how many troopers had been sent to space duty. The planetary divisions were sparse now, and that was a good thing.

Once safe—relatively—in their hideout, Colonel Kira shed her Breen uniform and helmet as if they were infected. Despite their service, she hated them. Kira hid her feelings poorly. That which represented her enemy was also her enemy. Irrational. Damar decided to also learn from that.

“Well?” she asked abruptly. “What happened at the resistance meeting? We have to make a plan, know what to do.”

They sat together around a small crude table. Garak was fairly bursting to tell it, so Damar motioned for him to speak.

“The vote was unanimous,” Garak bubbled. “Everyone agreed that the work disruptions would begin tomorrow morning!”

Damar paused as Mila, Garak’s old family friend and the only Cardassian woman here, came down the steps with a tray of food. “Power, transportation, and communications facilities all over Cardassia will be sabotaged.”

“The Dominion fleet,” Garak barreled on, “will be cut off from all ground support.”

“That way,” Kira appreciated, “they’ll have to face the Federation alliance invasion force on their own.”

Damar nodded. “And once the Dominion is crushed—”

“Cardassia will be free again.” Mila spoke firmly, interrupting the men with a confidence she had rarely shown. Hope shined in her silvery face as she gazed down at Garak. “Elim, I have to admit than when you were a little boy, I was worried about you. Always getting into trouble … quiet, secretive, so full of deceit. Little did I know you would turn such distasteful characteristics into virtues. More tea?”

“You’re too kind.” Garak smiled up at her.

Damar leaned toward him. “She’s right, you know.”

“About me?” Garak asked.

“About Cardassia. We will be free again, we will rid ourselves of the Dominion once and for all.”

Never again, he held back from saying, would they allow themselves to be turned into stooges of another power. No, he couldn’t say that aloud! There was too much bitterness. It hurt too much to think how the Dominion had embraced the Cardassians, then shunted them lower than the Jem’Hadar, then lower than the Vorta, and now once again even lower than the Breen. A proud nation could only stand so much, no matter how much was promised. Some victories were simply not worth the price paid.

He turned to Kira before those unfortunate words came out.

“How ironic,” Garak added, “that the famous Bajoran of Deep Space Nine should come to Cardassia’s aid.”

Damar nearly struck him for his foolishness in reminding her of what she was doing, and for whom she was doing it, the strange bedfellows created by conquest and necessity. Here he was fighting against the official Cardassian allies, and she, a Bajoran, was in her way fighting for the salvation of the Cardassian nation which had so long tormented her and her people. Oh, irony and its many winds.

Though a flint of insult sprang in her eyes, Kira smiled. “Tonight is going to be a long night. A lot can go wrong.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Damar told her. “too much is at stake.”

No one responded to that. It fell with a clunk to the stone floor, and he was sure it echoed.

“Have you assigned duties for the assault team?” Kira asked. Her question was firmly pointed—if he hadn’t, he should have, and if he didn’t, she would.

“We have a schematic of the city,” he responded. “I’ll lay it in a grid pattern and assign one commando to each grid. Whatever target facilities fall within a certain grid will determine how many resisters are assigned to each commando.”

“I can lay the grid,” Garak volunteered.

Kira added, “I can brief the teams.”

Damar agreed, then asked, “Do you have any information about when the invasion fleet will arrive?”

She sighed. “Well, it’s hard to keep a thousand ships a secret, but the allied force has done a fair job of distracting and confusing the Dominion spies—and ours right along with them. We know the fleet is coming soon, but if it were me I wouldn’t pull the squadrons together until they all rendezvoused at Deep Space Nine. Until then, no one would be sure how many ships were involved.”

“You saw how empty the streets are,” Damar pointed out. “Significant portions of the planetary forces have been depleted. That means the Jem’Hadar and Breen are being put back in space. That is why we must act tomorrow, while facility guards are at a minimum.”

“Two fronts, gentlemen,” Kira said. “The fleet in space, and us down here. Both had better succeed, or everything will collapse faster than you can say ‘labor camp.’”

Damar stood up, signaling that the talk was over and the action must begin. “Either way, by noon tomorrow our resistance movement will either be famous or we will all be dead. I’m looking forward to it.”

* * *

Through black open space, the massive Federation-Klingon-Romulan offensive fleet moved like a great shoal of herring seeking a spawning ground. They were many, but with a single purpose. When a thousand ships come together, the logistics of not knocking into one another becomes a moment by moment obsession for a thousand captains, a thousand engineering chiefs, and a thousand helmsmen. Space, normally wide enough for galaxies to pass through each other without collision, suddenly becomes very crowded and limited indeed.

They knew they couldn’t hide anymore, and therefore speed and organization became the primary factors. Who would be the vanguard? Who would flank? How much strength would be committed to a first wave and how much held in reserve? Commodores from each allied division powwowed through the night, causing reports and rumors to chitter constantly despite the reduction of general communication.

And each ship had its private problems. Systems were imperfect in general—on a ship, it’s never a matter of whether something will break down, but when it will. Mechanics had no loyalties, no stamina in adversity, no idea that today was of particular importance. If the last molecule cracked, something would break and would have to be fixed.

Between the captain’s chair and the helm on board the new Defiant, Ben Sisko was listening to something that only long experience allowed him to perceive.

“You hear that, Chief?”

At his engineering console, O’Brien frowned. “Sounds like the Doppler compensators are out of phase.”

Sisko looked at Nog. “How’s she handling, ensign?”

“She’s not quite as smooth as the old Defiant, sir,” the young Ferengi said. “Feels a bit sluggish.”

“Chief?”

“I’m on it,” O’Brien said, annoyed. “O’Brien to engineering. Recalibrate the inertial dampers and check the plasma flow regulators while you’re at it.”

“Right away, Chief.”

Sisko understood how the senior engineer felt. The ship might or might not be a good ship—they didn’t know yet. She hadn’t even had time for a shakedown cruise at high warp, or a sustained cruise at impulse to weed out her problems. There had throughout history been beautiful ships, powerful ships, bigger-than-ever-before ships that had proven very quickly that they weren’t among the “good ships.” Some had been lucky enough to survive the discovery of their inner weaknesses. Others fell apart, sank, failed, or couldn’t stand up to trouble on their first or second voyage. Until a ship was tried by real use, there was no way to know how well all the engineered parts would actually work together—no matter how tight, no matter how exactly manufactured—no way but work to find the flaws. Time was the only saturation treatment for a ship. Sail out, see how she stresses, see what breaks and replace it, see what bends and strengthen it … only time and trouble could hammer a new ship into a good ship. Defiant hadn’t yet been given that time.

He tried not to resent the new ship, even as he wished for the security and familiarity of the old ship. The old Defiant had hammered through every test. They’d repaired her themselves, with their own hands, not having to take anybody else’s word that fixes had been done and done well. They knew her weaknesses and could circumvent them. They knew her strengths and could use them. Going into an invasion scheme with a brand new untried ship—it demanded a trust he just couldn’t give yet.

At the engineering console, Miles O’Brien grumbled at the acknowledgement from engineering. His mood could stand improvement. Beside him, passively watching the fleet on the main screen, Julian Bashir just had to be sitting right here on this side of the bridge—why couldn’t he be down in sickbay treating a hangnail or something?

“You’d think someone would’ve come up with a better inertial control system,” O’Brien grumbled. “Just because a man has plans to return to Earth and teach at a nice quiet academy doesn’t mean he’s not … oh, the devil with it … what idiot changed the color code on this panel?”

Bashir finally turned and asked, “What’s that you’re saying, Miles?”

“I said, could you please wipe that grin off your face? You’re not the first person to ever fall in love, you know.”

The grin fell away. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

“I am happy for you. O’Brien to engineering. Try realigning the induction coils.”

“Aligning the induction coils now.”

“You do that … look, Julian …” He forced himself to swivel halfway around. “There’s something I have to talk to you about …”

Bashir gently bridged, “You’re getting pressure from Keiko, aren’t you?”

“How’d you know!”

“It’s a big decision. I’m surprised it didn’t come up sooner.”

Sunken partially by relief and partially because he’d been so easy to read, O’Brien felt his shoulders sag. “Actually, we’ve been talking about it for quite a while.”

“Well, you can stop talking about it,” the doctor offered. “You can put the model of the Alamo into my quarters.”

“Oh … model …”

At the helm, Nog turned toward port. “I could still use a little more equalization on the torque buffers.”

O’Brien flinched. “Oh—right. I’ll try to compensate with the impulse response filters.”

“That way,” Bashir accommodated, “your quarters won’t be so cluttered, and you can still use it whenever you want.”

He worked a moment or two, forcing himself to concentrate. There had to be equalization, or Nog wouldn’t be able to hold the ship laterally in this crowd. Usually it didn’t matter so much, when all of space was there for moving around in, but in the middle of a fleet—

“I wasn’t talking about the Alamo model,” he suddenly said. “Besides, it’s too big for your quarters.”

“You let me worry about that,” Bashir offered. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

Ouch—he knew there was something else going on. O’Brien surveyed his own reaction to moving to Earth, leaving his long-time post, and recalled that when he’d first worked with Bashir he hadn’t really liked him much. Strange how completely things could change over the years. He’d never expected to find so much in common with the young doctor, never mind ultimately building models together and playing out historical problems of battle—and really liking it.

“It’s nothing that can’t wait,” he finally lied. “Is that any better, Nog?”

“Torque buffers are stable,” Nog said from the helm.

Bashir nodded in silent agreement. He knew he was being put off, and it worried him. Why wouldn’t Miles tell him what was the problem? He watched as his friend disappeared into the aft lift and was swallowed by the ship. Why did happiness and problems have to balance each other? Why couldn’t everything just go well for once?

He swiveled around forward again, and as he did that his eyes fell upon Ezri, sitting at her station beside Worf. The two of them were as different as feathers from stone, yet it disturbed him to see them together. They were speaking to each other now. If he watched, he might be able to know what they were saying. They were keeping their voices down—quite a trick for Worf.

No, he shouldn’t watch. He really shouldn’t.

* * *

“The color coding on the weapons display panel is different from that on our Defiant.”

Worf’s chunky declaration was a poor effort to avoid the problem between them. Ezri watched his face, and she knew he was aware of her, very much too aware. She remembered how his eyes changed when they kissed. So many lives were roaming within her mind, but the one she could focus most easily on was the one that made the two of them most uncomfortable. The most recent life … his dead wife.

Yes, Jadzia was dead. There was undeniable finality even for a Trill, though the essence lived on in the next host. The Dax symbiont within Ezri was a stranger in many ways, having invaded a girl who had never prepared for symbiosis. That was strange for him, too. All the other hosts had been ready, even eager. Ezri continued to struggle, her mind cluttered and disorganized. Controlling the impulses of the Dax’s former lives, and all the memories, was like trying to conduct an orchestra when she had no idea how to hold the baton.

“You sure you’re not angry?” she urged, insisting that the panel’s color code would not be the subject.

“About the weapons display?” Worf toyed.

She tipped her head. “About Julian.”

Worf’s face hardened visibly. “Why should I be angry? I’ve been asking you to tell the doctor how you feel about him for the past month.”

“Well, now that he knows how I feel—”

“I am happy for you.”

In a mountainous kind of way.

She smiled. “That’s a relief.

“But I am going to kill him.”

Ezri tilted forward a little, trying to read his eyes, and rewarded him with half a giggle.

His eyes bothered her.

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

Worf made a grumble in the bottom of his throat. “And Jadzia complained I had no sense of humor.”

On the main deck, Captain Sisko listened in frustration to the imbalances of his new ship and also noticed the sad imbalance among his crew. He heard the rumblings of Worf and the musical lilt of Ezri behind him, though he consciously refused to pay attention to what was obviously a private conversation. He missed Jadzia almost as much as he had missed Curzon Dax before her. Yes, it was a little prejudicial, but Jadzia hadn’t really been able to take Curzon’s place. She’d become a special friend in her own right. Now, Ezri was doing her best to take Jadzia’s place, and she couldn’t. Not for Sisko, and certainly not for Worf. No essence of memory could replace a living, breathing person, and no other person could slip into a haven of special affection. That was asking and expecting too much.

Both men were dealing with the handicap of not being Trill themselves. Both Sisko and Worf were single individuals, living out their lives as one and only one. He knew in his mind that all the Dax’s and hosts were in there somewhere, and yet his heart wanted to grieve. He could only imagine what Worf must be feeling behind that armored personality.

Beside him, Odo gazed up at the tactical station where Worf and Ezri were talking. Sisko watched him without really looking. Another cracked soul.

“I wish she was here, constable,” he offered. Odd—he actually meant two different women with that “she.”

Odo averted his gaze from up there, a little selfconscious now. “Actually, captain, I wasn’t thinking about Kira just then.”

He paused, and Sisko had the sense not to pointedly ask what he meant. If Odo wanted to talk—

“For years now,” the shapeshifter began tentatively, “I’ve been ashamed of my fellow Changelings … knowing about the races they’ve enslaved … the atrocities they’ve committed … but now, knowing that it was Section Thirty-One—that it was a band of rogue Federation citizens who’d infected my people with the Changeling disease … an act of genocide as cold and calculated as anything the Dominion ever did—”

“You can’t help but feel some sympathy for your people,” Sisko completed.

Odo nodded. “It makes a difficult situation even more complicated. This war, Captain … it has to end.”

“One way or another,” Sisko agreed. “It will, and soon. Wars always—Odo? Odo? Is something wrong? You look—”

Why was Odo’s heart beating so loudly? Why had a spotlight come on at the bridge ceiling? Sisko flinched and squinted into the light. He wanted to turn and order the light off. Malfunction, obviously. O’Brien? What’s going on?

“My … son.”

The heartbeat grew louder. He could feel it physically now. Was it his own? Odo had no heart….

Before him a physical form began to take shape. A building. Pillars. A shrine. A Bajoran shrine. Instinctively he recognized it, though the lines were muddled by brightness.

And another form. A pillar changing shape, moving toward him.

“Mother?” he began.

What a bizarre thing. His natural mother, not the mother he knew in childhood, but the one who had abandoned him to grow up human, to think he was normal, ordinary, fit to face the challenges of humanity. The Prophets were calling to him through this woman of nonessence, this ethereal being who had ceded him to his place so long ago, forcing him to live two lives now.

“Why have you brought me here?” he demanded.

“This is the last time I will ever speak to you like this,” the Prophet said in her musical voice. “The Emissary’s task is nearing completion.”

What was that supposed to mean? Was he out of a spiritual job? Day after day, he’d managed to put aside his mystical assignment and do the duty he preferred—and now, right in the middle of trouble, this.

“You mean the war is coming to an end?” he asked.

“You have walked the path the Prophets have laid out for you, Benjamin. Do not falter now.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Know this, my son. Your journey’s end lies not before you, but behind you.”

Oh, fine. Sisko felt a very tangible groan rumble through his chest despite the dreamy circumstance. Why must highly advanced superbeings always speak in vague riddles? Why did they have to be the wind? Just once couldn’t they say, “Go over to this specific place and kick the behind off this specific person and come home and have a brew?”

“Captain? Captain?”

“I hate poetry,” he muttered. “I’m a Starfleet officer. Why can’t you just give me a direct order? And I refuse to look backward. The future isn’t set or I wouldn’t bother to get up in the morning. Do you hear me?”

His prophet-mother lowered her hands, and the light went away. The bridge filtered back to solidity before him.

“Captain, are you all right?”

Odo was watching him, his plastic face tight with concern.

Sisko thought about explaining, describing the vision forced upon him by his mystical connection. He thought about voicing the frustration of living two lives—one as a Starfleet captain with a real ship and solid crew to handle, the other as a mysterious floaty being from the Wormhole Collection, without awareness of concrete purpose. He’d come to realize that he didn’t like talk of destiny. He had defied prophesy before and was ready to do it again. He’d rather have free choice and make the honest wrong one.

“The Prophets just came to me in a vision,” he said bluntly, hoping it didn’t sound as silly in the receiving as it did in the saying.

Odo seemed cautious. “I take it they weren’t bringing good news.”

“I’m not sure,” Sisko muttered. “I suppose only time will tell.”

* * *

“Hello, Adami.”

Dukat didn’t wait for the Kai to turn at his greeting before walking right in on her. In fact, Kai Winn didn’t even look up from her reading of the Kosst Amojan. So she knew it was Dukat intruding upon her and was determined to let him know she was unimpressed. Ah, well.

“You’re back,” was her manner of greeting.

He wanted her to look up. He wanted her to see him as a Bajoran, a surgically altered Cardassian quite insisting upon looking like one of the native people on this planet. His clothing was ragged, caked with dust from the streets of Bajor. Somehow he was proud of that, proud that he had survived being the lowest of the low, the condemned, the downcast, and had yet somehow kept his identity through the great wringer of adversity. All his years as a Cardassian officer, eventually as high commander, leader of planets, and leader of fleets; through all the dozen changes of circumstance in the struggles between the Federation, the Alpha Quadrant Empires, the Dominion, and the Cardassians, through the many shifts of power—somehow this latest incarnation satisfied him most of all, for it proved he could go low and still return.

Would she speak to him? Was she still sufficiently insulted by the Prophets’ choice of Sisko as their Emissary instead of her, or had she repented in the time Dukat had been banished to the streets?

He wanted to know, but he stayed back, on the opposite side of the room, near the door. He would never again go near that forbidden book. His eyes still stung with its vengeful magic.

“Is that all you have to say to me?” he asked eventually.

Kai Winn dawdled over her book, then finally looked up. “I see the Pah-wraiths have restored your sight.”

A warning triggered in Dukat’s head. Blindness had given him insights he never expected. He needed the Kai’s good graces. Resentment must be controlled. If she still resented the Prophets, if she would still help him free the anti-Prophet Pah-wraiths, then Sisko and the Prophets could be overthrown with a power that matched their own.

He hid his anger behind a smile. “The Pah-wraiths have forgiven my trespasses. They have accepted that my attempt to read the Kosst Amojan was a desperate mistake. I hope you can find it in your heart to do the same.”

The Kai leaned back in her chair and eyed him coldly. “Forgive you? I don’t forgive Cardassian war criminals.”

Dukat remained silent. Might as well take whatever she had to say. Hereafter they would both know the wound had been purged, that she had said what needed to be said.

“All you’ve ever done,” she continued after a moment, “is lie to me. Pretending to be a poor farmer from Bajor when in actuality you’re a Cardassian war criminal. To think I took Gul Dukat to my bed, one of the most hated men in Bajoran history—”

“I wasn’t lying when I offered you my heart,” he claimed bluntly.

“Of course not!” her scorn painted the room. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I have completed my study of the text of the Kosst Amojan. Its secrets are now my secrets.”

That didn’t sound very hopeful, did it? It meant she had more power than he could have, and influence with the Pah-wraiths, which he had failed to acquire. She was the Kai, the religious leader of Bajor, and the Pah-wraiths had let her read their book without blinding her, while the Prophets had never even let her have a single vision and had chosen an offworlder as their representative.

He would have to find a way to make her work with him, and definitely not against him. She had banished him, blinded, to the streets, and now he had returned. Checking his own bitterness might be the best path.

“You’ve learned how to release the Pah-wraiths?” he asked, unable to hide his real thoughts or his admiration for her obvious spiritual stature, which had been ignored by the Prophets.

“I have,” she claimed proudly.

“Then why haven’t you gone to the Fire Caves and freed them?”

Offering only a beguiling smile, Kai Winn leered at him. “I was waiting for you.”

Relief poured through Dukat. “Then you have forgiven me!”

“I need your help, Dukat.” She rose from her chair, crossed the rug that separated them, and finally stood before him. “It’s as simple as that.”

He turned his hands up. “All you have to do is ask.”

He reached for her hand—amazingly, she gave it. So she was still angry with the Prophets, or perhaps beyond anger and well into bitterness.

“Together,” he said, “we will free the Pah-wraiths so that they can tear down the Celestial Temple and destroy the Prophets.”

“And their Emissary as well.”

Dukat tucked his chin. “No. Benjamin Sisko will be dealt with by me, and me alone.”

“Assuming he survives the invasion of Cardassia,” the Kai observed cryptically.

“He’ll survive,” Dukat grumbled. “But I promise you, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

CHAPTER

4

Bad hand. Figured.

“Do you have any threes?”

Quark surveyed his cards again, but they hadn’t changed. He kept them close to his face, as if the computer in the holosuite didn’t perfectly well know what cards he was holding.

“Go fish.” The computer-generated lounge lizard of the hololounge eyed him from his seat across the table.

Annoyed, Quark sighed and dumped his cards on the table. This just wasn’t working.

“Don’t tell me you’re quitting,” Vic Fontaine challenged.

“It’s just not my game,” Quark complained.

“Want to try pinochle again?”

Quark shook his head. If the computer couldn’t cough up something more interesting than these games, how could he possibly offer something new to his customers in his real bar, down the real stairs, with the real money?

“How about rummy?” Vic offered. “Or gin rummy? Five-card stud? Canasta?”

Quark kept shaking his head. There just wasn’t enough zap in any of those to distract the denizens of Deep Space Nine from what was going on way off in space. Not enough to get them to come in and start spending, anyway.

“How about some Tongo?” he countered snidely.

Vic eyed him. “Did they play Tongo in Las Vegas in 1962?”

A smart-ass computer. Great. “How could they?” he bothered to answer. “It’s a Ferengi game.”

He thought about shutting down the program, but for some odd reason he liked Vic’s company. Wasn’t that pathetic?

“Right,” Vic said. “Which is why my holographic program can’t create it.”

“I know, I know, this place is period-specific … but for a hologram, you’re not very accommodating.”

Ich—he’d been trying to be friendly with non-Ferengis for way too long. He was starting to be like them. He’d be humiliated to admit it to a fellow Ferengi, that the people around here—even the holopeople—were more like friends than customers. A moment of sadness and worry pushed in on his fantasy. He did want them all to come back safely—even if it didn’t make him a bit richer.

What if they lost? What if the Federation fleet were defeated and the Cardassians reclaimed Deep Space Nine? He didn’t like that idea at all, and—shamefully—it had nothing to do with the change of business. The Cardassians had been a lot easier to snooker than the humans and Bajorans, but he still didn’t want them back.

“Is that why you came by?” Vic asked. “To insult me?”

“I stopped by because I had nothing else to do,” Quark admitted. “My bar hasn’t had half a dozen customers all day. Seems like everyone’s off fighting this stupid war.”

“It’s not easy to stay behind, is it?” Vic asked. “Knowing your friends are out there risking their lives?”

How could a computer-generation possibly see through him like that! Had the hardware grown intuition?

He shrugged. “They think they have it tough. They should try living my life for a day. The hospitality industry isn’t for the faint-hearted.”

Vic nodded. “A bartender’s life is a lonely one.”

“That’s right. But few people understand that. They think it’s one big happy party. They forget that the person giving the party never has any fun. He’s busy making sure everyone else is having fun. All I do, all day long, is give, give, give—”

“Bartending is a very noble profession,” Vic agreed. “And you do it well. Under some very difficult circumstances, I might add. You should be proud.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, pallie.”

Quark sighed, then muttered, “I just hope Nog and the rest of those heroic idiots come back in one piece….

Just then, the girl called Ginger snaked up to Vic dressed for a night of questionable morality and purred, “Vic, sweetie, are you ready? Jimmy and Petey are about to go on.”

Vic got to his feet and let Ginger slip under his arm. “Sorry, pallie,” he said to Quark, “gotta run. Durante and Lawford are at the Sands. Can’t miss that.”

“I thought you said a bartender’s life was a lonely one,” Quark challenged.

“It is—but I’m not a bartender.”

So much for a friendly ear. Quark watched as the hologuy and gal slithered away into their own world.

“Go fish,” he grumbled.

This must be the computer’s way of telling him he had to live a real life, deal with the lack of personnel on the station, and accept where they had gone. Strange how lifelike the holoprograms could be, how feeling and understanding, even to the point of forcing him to think about reality in the midst of fantasy. He’d tried to escape his real situation by coming to a fake bar at a fake time, and it hadn’t worked.

Of course it hadn’t. The station knew it was on alert, and it knew perfectly well why. Could a machine programmed to connect reactions and responses to appropriate information—could it comprehend fear? Anticipation? Could it sense that things were not normal today? Would a station on yellow alert warn a hologuy and a hologal not to get too involved?

“Yes, it could,” Quark muttered. “Why not? It’s the age of miracles, isn’t it? The time of the Prophets? The eon of starships and like wonders? All right, then, you win. Hear me? I’ve had my hand slapped. Back to reality. Program off.”

* * *

The Fire Caves were well-named: hot and moist, walls dripping with condensate, shots of steam spurting from cracks in the rocky floor. The climb up to them was no easy jog either, yet somehow Dukat felt more invigorated than exhausted.

Behind him, however, he knew Kai Winn was suffering from the excessive heat—which did not bother him much, as he was Cardassian under the skin. His heavy backpack, filled with artifacts and ceremonial relics, was a good burden. Because he would not touch the Kosst Amojan, though, Kai Winn was charged with carrying the heavy book all the way by herself. She sank against another stone outcropping, looking as if she were about to melt.

Dukat paused. “Is it really necessary to rest every few minutes?”

She heaved a series of breaths, obviously troubled by the altitude as well as the heat. “I don’t need … you … to wait for me…. Go on ahead … wander around aimlessly in these caves for … the rest of your miserable life.”

Ah—pushed the wrong buttons that time.

He settled back on a rock that almost provided a seat. “I’m in no hurry.”

Around them, the caves seethed and dripped, creating for themselves a mystical voice that had over the ages gained a reputation. The caves sang, some said. They cried, said others. They cursed, wept, or whispered. The caves were sorrow, some villagers thought, or threat, thought others. There were mystical injunctions against trespassing, or compelling charges to come here—perhaps to die as a sacrifice to the Pah-wraiths, spirits who claimed to be the true Prophets of Bajor. Some thought that the caves were the throat of hell.

Amazing.

“You know, during the Occupation my people found the Bajorans’ fear of these caves amusing. Yet somehow none of us ever found the time to visit them. And now, here I am. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“I don’t care,” Winn heaved.

Dukat looked at her. “Excuse me?”

“I’m sure you have many interesting anecdotes about the Occupation,” she dismissed, “but I have no desire to hear them.”

“I meant no disrespect, Adami—”

“And stop calling me ‘Adami.’ That privilege is no longer yours.”

Temper boiled in Dukat’s chest. Though he might appear Bajoran, he was Cardassian to the core and this was a severe lowering of himself, to coddle a Bajoran woman, to be forced to show her respect he was disinclined to give, to bend to her wishes, and now to be denied the right to call her by her primary name.

He held his rage.

“I see,” he allowed. “Then how should I—?”

Though he had some ideas about what to call her instead, Kai Winn said, “From now on, you will address me as ‘Eminence.’ Is that clear?”

Some day … some day….

Dukat gritted his teeth. “Perfectly,” he said. “Your Eminence.”

How far must they go? How deeply into these caves, how far into the belly of the planet would they have to trek before they could find the prison of the Pah-wraiths and use the power of the book to free them?

Nothing ever came easy, it seemed. Once he had been stripped of all past glories, he had been given another chance to defeat the Federation and the Prophets and everything that had worked to humiliate him in his life. Now he would make yet another pact with power in order to rise up again, yet it seemed he would have to travel into the pit before he could free that power.

Very well. He would no longer be driven down. The time of reckoning was here. If he had to walk through the molten core of Bajor in his bare feet, he would succeed.

* * *

“I see your point, general, but for two millennia the Jem’Hadar have always been the Dominion’s first line of defense. It would damage their morale to take a back seat to the Breen.”

The Founder shuddered against her illness, hoping the Breen general would not see her weakness. She was, in fact, not sure exactly what the Breen were able to see through their life-sustaining helmets. Perhaps his frosted face-shield blurred the crackling scabs of her face and hands. Perhaps he saw her only as a blur of humanoid form, but did not realize she was stuck holding that form, without the strength to revert to her natural shape. The sickness had made her a solid.

His static-voice erupted in a tone she had come to recognize as anger, impatience. She listened to his argument—that the Jem’Hadar had served for two millennia without managing to carry the Dominion to preeminence. Only since the Breen forces had become aligned with the Dominion had victory been within grasp.

True enough; it was certainly possible that the Jem’Hadar had outlived their collective purpose. Still, how would it appear to give in totally so soon?

A compromise might serve, and she would not have to give all her advantages away at once.

“Very well,” she told him. “In the spirit of our new alliance, I will inform the Jem’Hadar that the Breen forces will be positioned alongside them on the front lines.”

He chittered again, not entirely satisfied, but at least put off for now.

The Founder pressed painfully out of her chair. Her skin cracked and withered as she moved. She could barely hold the human form and had to pause to gather strength—or more accurately, to fend off weakness—before leading the general to one of the access monitors.

“I’m glad that pleases you,” she told him, even though that hadn’t been exactly what he’d said.

They turned their attention to the strategic layout, where Weyoun was studying the distribution of ships. “I fear,” he said, “our lines are spread too thin, especially here at the center.”

The Founder painfully rose from her chair and struggled to the monitor. “Do you agree?” she asked the Breen general.

He scrambled that he did agree, and thus the Founder told Weyoun, “Notify the Jem’Hadar. Order them to reinforce the center of our lines. The Federation fleet usually begins their assault by sending the smaller attack fighters to create distractions and weaken the—”

As she touched the controls, the picture on the screen suddenly flickered and went black. In the room, the lights dimmed, wobbled, dimmed still more and did not come back to brightness. The computer screen flashed once, then died.

“Now what?” she complained.

Seconds crawled by. What was happening? She hated lack of control. Surprises were almost always bad.

As she was about to call for Weyoun, the lights burped back to life. The monitor also regained a picture, but it was only a screen pattern. Connection with the strategic mainframe had been disrupted.

Before the Founder could curse the darkness, the door opened and the newly appointed liaison from the Cardassian force, Legate Broca, rushed in.

“Founder! I’m relieved to see you’re all right.”

She turned on him, bothered that he should use the term “all right” when she was so obviously ill and could no longer disguise the dessicating malady that was slowly debilitating her.

“What caused the power outage?” she demanded.

“Sabotage,” Broca dutifully told her, without frilling up the bad news. “Almost every Dominion installation on Cardassia Prime has suffered some form of damage!”

“Damar!” the Founder gritted. “I thought you said you had eliminated his rebel forces.”

“We captured some of the terrorists, but—”

“But what?”

“These acts of terrorism,” Weyoun attempted, “they weren’t carried out by a small group of disgruntled Cardassian soldiers. The culprits were ordinary citizens.”

The announcement embarrassed Broca, she could clearly see—in fact, he was completely ashamed.

And rightly so. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? She had charged him with keeping order on the planet.

She raised her hand, much faster than she expected herself capable of, and clasped him by the throat. “Are you telling me the Cardassian people are rising up against us?”

Broca choked, but did not fight her. “I’m sure … it’s only … a small number of malcontents….”

“We have no way of knowing that, do we?”

It was an enraging revelation. People who had been controlled, finding a way to rise up? Average citizens with no military support? Rise against the greatness of the Dominion? The Cardassians? The Jem’Hadar? Even the Breen?

The Founder cast a glance at the Breen general, and briefly entertained the idea of blaming him for not seeing this coming and assigning troopers to stop it. She could use that to deny him superiority over the Jem’Hadar and force him to struggle harder on the Dominion’s behalf…. Ultimately, though, she decided to keep using Weyoun, for he was the one with a stake in control on Bajor. She would wait for another time, when upsetting the balance would serve even better.

“Founder,” Weyoun began, “may I make a suggestion?”

Still strangling the Legate, the Founder said, “I’m sure Broca is most interested in what you have to say.”

The Vorta attache nodded elegantly and let an extra second or two pass before saying, “If the Cardassian people are responsible for these acts of terrorism … if they’ve allowed Damar and his fanatics to turn them against us, then it’s the people who should be punished.”

“What do you say to that?” she asked Broca.

Only his lips moved. “Severely punished….”

Nearly exhausted herself, she dropped him abruptly. “I’m glad we’re all in agreement.”

* * *

All the lights had been cut off. Any buildings without emergency backup generators were still shut down and even some of those generators had been damaged. The whole capital city was in blackout, as well as almost every industrial center planetwide. Wonderful….

Unfortunately, that also meant there was no power in the resistance’s cellar headquarters.

Damar reviewed with satisfaction the success of a very long night’s coordinated efforts. He had to give Kira and her rebels credit. They had done everything he had told them to, and with great deliberation and purpose. He had laid out every industrial and tactical center on the planet, and through clever coded messages they had organized themselves and carried out the night’s assault. If the invasion fleet failed, it would not be because the planet was in too good order and provided too solid a support for the Cardassian fleet. A planet in turmoil could do no fleet any favors, and that was all he meant for Cardassia to offer. No longer after this week would Cardassia be minion to the arrogant Founders. Lower than the Jem’Hadar, lower than the Breen—finally Cardassia would be driven as low as any civilization could go, and would have nowhere to travel but up again, up to greatness and power and dominance in an Alpha Quadrant free of the interloping shapeshifters.

If only they could see….

He peered through the darkness to the circuit box, where Garak was fussing at the junction, trying to trim off enough power to give them a monitor, even just one. The only source of light was a single struggling lightstick near Garak, not enough to prevent Garak from making some sort of mistake and getting his fingers zapped by a rogue arc.

Frustrated, Garak muttered, “I could use some more light over here….”

Hardly more than a silhouette as she stood guard near the doorway, Kira accommodated, “Mila’s looking for some upstairs—here she comes.”

“Twenty-four minutes,” Damar finalized.

Kira congratulated him with a “Not bad.”

“If the Dominion hasn’t been able to restore the power in the capital,” Garak observed, “then the entire planet must be in chaos.”

“Let’s hope so,” Damar said.

The old woman Mila appeared down the stairs with two more lightsticks.

“I’m afraid I could only find two lightsticks,” she apologized. “I know there are others in the house somewhere.”

“Stop dawdling,” Garak snapped, waving a hand, “and bring them over to me!”

The old Cardassian woman did as instructed. “Ah, how well I remember that tone of voice … it reminds me of the demanding and inconsiderate little boy you used to be.”

On his side of the cellar, Damar chuckled. Only a Cardassian woman could look back with reverie on a nasty child.

Garak gazed up at her. “I haven’t changed much, have I?” he asked.

“Enough reminiscing,” Damar chastised. “We have to get the power back up. I need to know how much damage we have caused the Dominion.”

“If this part of the city is any indication,” Mila commented, “I’d say a lot.”

Damar squinted at the padd. “I’d love to see the look on Weyoun’s face right now.”

“Let’s not fool ourselves, Damar,” Kira cautioned. “At best, we’ve won a skirmish. We have to hit them again—harder this time.”

“That won’t be easy,” Garak said. “They’ll have tightened their security.”

“It doesn’t matter. We can’t lose our momentum.”

Damar offered her a smile. “The commander is right. We can’t rest until we’ve rid ourselves of the Dominion once and for all. And when we do, we’ll have you to thank. This rebellion would’ve died in infancy if not for you.”

“How ironic,” Garak added, “that Cardassia’s savior should be a former Bajoran terrorist.”

“Don’t canonize me just yet,” Kira demurred.

All at once, the lights came back on. So their work had come and gone now.

“Twenty-six and a half minutes,” Damar concluded. “Let’s see what the Dominion has to say for itself.”

As he went to the monitor and tried to get it back online, Garak added, “One thing’s for sure—we’ve inconvenienced millions of Cardassian citizens.”

Kira moved impatiently toward him. “Don’t you think it’s a small price to pay if it helps to bring down the Dominion?”

Garak opened his mouth to shoot back a remark, but his own success cut him off as the power was suddenly restored, at least to this one room. The stairway remained dark, and there was no light shining from upstairs. That could be for the good.

“I always said you were a smart boy,” Mila lauded.

Ignoring their self-congratulating, Damar was concentrating on getting the monitor to operate. Finally it did, flickering to life just as Weyoun appeared on the screen, the hated face of that obsequious clown on the planetwide address system, cooing his pompous opinion around the world.

“Citizens of Cardassia … I speak to you tonight with a heavy heart. This latest wave of vandalism directed against your Dominion allies must stop.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Garak muttered.

“The Dominion views these acts of vandalism as nothing less than a cruel betrayal by a once-valued ally. Let me assure you, we know that these disgraceful acts of sabotage were carried out by a mere handful of disgruntled extremists who alone are to blame for this treachery….”

“That’s us,” Kira muttered, “disgruntled to the core.”

“And extreme,” Garak tacked on.

Damar waved a hand. “Quiet.”

“But these radicals,” the picture of Weyoun continued, his violet eyes, bitter and concerned, set in a face abnormally pale even for a Vorta, “must come to realize that their disobedience will not be tolerated … that you, the Cardassian people, must suffer the consequences of their cowardly actions.”

“Uh-oh,” Kira breathed.

Damar couldn’t remain quiet this time. “I don’t like the sound of that….”

“That’s why,” the monitor continued, “a few moments ago, Dominion troops reduced Lakarian City to ashes. There were no survivors … two million men, women, and children … gone in a matter of seconds.”

Mila sank into the nearest chair. Disturbing, since at her age it was she who had seen more atrocity and barbarism than the rest of them put together. Kira folded her arms in visible anguish. Even Garak had no words to ease the astonishment.

Damar was also appalled, the more so because he thought he should have seen this coming. Still, the Vorta had been cunning before, while not openly brutal.

Weyoun had stopped talking for a few long painful seconds, as if allowing the news to sink in all over the planet. What were the other millions of Cardassians thinking, hoping, feeling, wishing? For the deaths of the Vorta? The Dominion? Or the deaths of the rebels?

“Appalling, isn’t it?” he cooed. “Life is so precious … and now all that’s left of those vibrant, precious people are cinders in the dust. And that’s just the beginning.”

“Damar,” Garak began.

“Quiet!” Damar shot back.

“From now on,” Weyoun said, “for each act of sabotage committed against the Dominion, another Cardassian city will be destroyed.”

In each mind throughout the cellar, perhaps throughout the planet, each man and woman calculated how many acts of sabotage must go by before there was nothing left of Cardassia. Hardly anyone lived in the countryside … everyone else lived in a city. It was a planet of cities. There was nowhere else to hide, no way to live without the comforting infrastructure of civilization. Even their farmed foodstuffs were imported.

Such a system had laid itself bare for slaughter. Weyoun had apparently found that out—Cardassians were creatures of modern times, and could easily be herded to the butcher’s block.

No one else had ever figured that out before. In all of Cardassia’s conquests, never before had the battle come to their planet itself.

“I implore you,” the false sympathy of Weyoun continued, “not to let that happen. Let us look beyond the mistakes of the past and return to the spirit of friendship and cooperation that existed between the Dominion and Cardassia. Together we can accomplish what we set out to do—defeat our common enemies … the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, and all others who stand against us. Thank you.”

The screen went blank.

No one spoke. Only the sound of Mila’s soft weeping disturbed the blanket of horror.

“I knew there’d be reprisals,” Kira struggled, “but I didn’t think they’d go this far….”

Damar swung away from the monitor as if dismissing it and Weyoun with it. “Do they really think this is going to stop us?” he threatened.

“Doesn’t it?” Garak challenged. “How many cities can we afford to lose?”

“We can’t afford to lose any,” Damar told him, “but we have to be willing to lose them all. We must be free! Even if it costs us everything.”

Would they accept his charge? Were they as committed as he was to throwing off the yoke of the Dominion?

He looked at Garak, then Kira. Oddly, the one who gave him support was the one he didn’t address.

Mila. The old Cardassian woman who seemed the weakest among them, reduced to bringing tea and lightsticks, now turned her tear-streaked face up to him. She was no longer crying, though. She had passed through that, and now drove them on to something far more moving.

“We must be free,” she said.

Damar gazed at her in gratitude, the first gaze of credibility he had ever offered her. She deserved recognition for her bravery, for being willing to stand behind his rash words, indeed words that might result in the utter eradication of their race.

Seeing what was happening, and that there was no going back, Kira unfolded her arms and straightened her shoulders. “Then we have to hit them again. Right away. They won’t be expecting that.”

Shoring up his own posture, Damar took a single step to the center of the cellar. “I should’ve killed that Vorta jackal when I had the chance.”

“You might get another chance,” Kira told him. “We have to attack Dominion Headquarters.”

Garak stepped into Damar’s periphery. “Chop off a snake’s head and its body dies.”

“Damar,” Kira said, stepping closer, “for the past two years you practically lived in that building—”

“If you’re asking me whether I know a way to get us inside, the answer is no,” he told her irascibly. “Not without valid security protocols.”

“Then we’ll have to force our way in. Garak, we’ll need some kind of explosive device.”

“I’ll get right on it.”

Mila stood up slowly. “What you’re proposing … is suicide!”

“Mila,” Garak snapped, “if you don’t have anything positive to say—”

The old woman looked at him with an expression that caused even the gregarious Garak to fall silent with respect. She had been through more in her life than the three of them could claim in their combined lives. Something changed for her in that moment, and for them because of her expression.

Though her words were simple and pedestrian, her meaning was profound.

“I’ll prepare you some food. No one should die on an empty stomach.”

CHAPTER

5

Ben Sisko felt his pride buffeted by what he saw on the new battleship’s wide forward screen.

Yes, the combined allied fleet must be an impressive sight—he could only see part of it from the port- and starboard-side auxiliary monitors—but what was coming at them out of the night was even more formidable in its ruthlessness.

Before them the combined forces of the angry, insulted Dominion, Breen, and Cardassian fleets were arrayed, fully armed, shielded, and ready for this last great battle with the civilizations they had decided to conquer.

While Starfleet, the Klingons, and the Romulans were defending their very homes and had much to lose, the Dominion armada had nothing here to protect and could afford to be bold. Sisko would be lying to himself if he hadn’t admitted to a cold ball in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the enemy armada. It was downright intimidating to see them coming.

Emissary or not, Prophet’s son or not, commander and captain or not, Sisko was stricken with an all-too-human instinctive shudder at the sight of Romulan warbirds and Cardassian battleships left over from the days when the Romulans were enemies. Those ships carried with them echoes of two brutal civilizations that had variously targeted human beings and Earth as their ultimate enemy in both spirit and cause. In the past, Starfleet had been forced to fight for the life of the Federation against both those mighty organizations, and more lately against the Dominion and those pesky, purposeful Jem’Hadar who did the Founders’ bidding. How many more times in history would the Federation have to come up against determined conquerors? And could they prevail one more time? This was an old song, and no one yet knew the last verse.

“Sir?”

Ezri shook him out of his doomful thoughts.

He looked toward her, but couldn’t summon a simple response.

“Admiral Ross would like to speak to you,” she said.

Well, he had to find his voice for that, didn’t he?

“Onscreen,” he managed.

The forward viewscreen changed away from the ominous view of the distant and closing enemy armada to the somehow less heartening vision of Admiral Ross on the bridge of his flagship, the Starship Farragut.

“I’d say we have our work cut out for us, Captain,” he simply said.

No point being formal or particularly mystical—everybody could see the armada by now.

“Looks that way,” Sisko bluntly said.

Ross offered a non-regulation shrug. “Good luck.”

That was it? Just good luck?

Sisko suddenly empathized with the admiral—what else could he say? A rousing speech of hope and glory, or just a simple exhortation, like Nelson before Trafalgar … we expect every man to do his duty …

“Sir,” Ezri interrupted. “Chancellor Martok is requesting a three-way communication with you and Admiral Ross.”

Why not? Barring any more bright telegrams from his mother, how many more surprises could happen with the enemy in sight?

Should ask Ross, though, just to be polite.

“Admiral?” he offered.

Ross paused, then said, “Put him through.”

The screen split into two halves, one with Ross, the other with the famous and deserving Klingon warrior Martok who had been so true a friend to Sisko for … was it almost a year?

“Gentlemen!” Martok looked invigorated as he raised both arms in greeting. “A glorious victory lies before us!”

“I trust those are prophetic words, Chancellor.” Admiral Ross said, not seeming to want to commit just yet.

“They are.” Martok apparently read the subdued admiral’s tone correctly, and lowered his own voice. “I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to both of you.”

Sisko smiled. “That the three of us would share a bottle of bloodwine on Cardassia Prime.”

“A bottle! I brought a barrel of 2309! There is no finer vintage!”

Ross nodded resignedly, obviously not in the spirit of this at all. “Then I’ll meet you both on Cardassia.”

“Let us see who gets there first!” Martok raised a fist, and instantly cut off his transmission.

Without ceremony, Ross cut his own off, and once again Sisko was alone with his own ship and crew. He had to admit admiration for Martok’s old-fashioned Klingon spirit, for which the battle gave as much satisfaction as the victory, if any. The mere act of fighting held its own kind of honor. He understood that, in its ancient Viking way, but today he also clearly saw the results of failure lurking in their dim future. They wouldn’t get a second chance against a force as determined and providential as the Dominion. Perhaps it was all the years of close proximity to Odo, discovering and later depending upon the shapeshifter’s strong personal resolve, his versatility, and the depth of his conviction. To come up against a whole race of such mystical beings—so physically advanced, so intelligent, and yet determined … this was a frightening thing. The Founders were advanced in many ways, yes, but their backward sense of superiority and lack of respect for other life forms made them very dangerous indeed.

At the helm, Nog broke the silence. “The chancellor makes it sound like an easy victory.”

Maybe the ensign wanted somebody to agree with Martok. Sisko couldn’t offer him that.

“He knows it won’t be,” he said instead. This was it. He struck the comm unit on the arm of his command chair, broadcasting his voice directly to every deck. “Sisko to all hands. Prepare to engage the enemy.”

* * *

The Federation fleet was made up of six squadrons of Starfleet vessels, each led by two heavy cruiser starships, vanguarded by four assault ships and twenty fighters, and rearguarded by two destroyers charged not to let the enemy get past them. Sisko remembered picket duty—it was critical and frustrating to lag behind, to be the last line of defense, waiting to swat down any enemy ships that punched through the primary line. Here there were no home planets to defend, but the destroyers were charged with making sure that any Cardassian, Breen, or Jem’Hadar ships that ruptured the Allied lines couldn’t turn around and attack unsuspecting ships who might be engaged to forward and not expect attacks from the rear.

Starfleet flanked the main body of the Allied fleet to portside. On the starboard were the Klingon heavy cruisers and their support wings. In the middle, making up the biggest portion, were the Romulan warnings, motherships, and a phalanx of birds-of-prey in front. Over the past ten years or so, the Romulans had been at war least of any of the three civilizations, and simply had more ships in better condition than either the Federation or the Klingons. Sisko might have been bothered by the primary position of the Romulans, except that it was his own idea to put them there. He’d suggested this formation to Ross when they’d first discussed the idea of a mass assault. Unlike the Klingons, who could be rash, the Romulans were unflappable, fearless, calm, and calculating. They would make a very firm trunk for the Allied tree. Bristling with a hedgehog of Klingon fighters along the whole vanguard of all three battalions, the Allied fleet was as well organized and positioned as Sisko could ever have hoped.

Soon, he knew, the beautiful formation would smash headlong into the ovoid cluster of enemy ships, make its best first assault, then dissolve into a hundred individual dogfights. At that moment, the glorious painting of martial wonder would turn bloody.

He was ready. They all were. In fact, they were impatient to get going, to lance the wound that had so long festered.

“There go the Klingon advance fighters!” O’Brien gasped.

On the forward screen they watched as the prickly Klingon line suddenly surged forward, gaining speed in a shocking rush, firing as they went, not waiting to be fired upon.

In the distance, the egg-shaped enemy formation spread apart suddenly as if to engulf the approaching fighters. A fireworks of ice-green bulbs of light erupted across open space, as Klingon streaks of yellow disuptor fire encountered Jem’Hadar shields. Then the Jem’Hadar returned fire and advanced to meet the fighters.

“Hold formation,” Sisko ordered, sensing the rush of adrenaline getting the better of his crew. “Let them come to us.”

To their starboard, the Farragut and Nelson surged forward suddenly, and before them the line of Starfleet fighters broke formation, parted like a melon cut with a knife, and peeled off in two different directions.

“When we engage,” Sisko began evenly, “I want to concentrate on one enemy ship at a time. That’s going to be hard. They’ll be all around us. Unless we’re being fired upon, don’t respond to any passes. Keep your eyes on the one ship we target and stay on its tail. Understood?”

“Understood,” Nog answered, echoed by Ezri and Worf behind him.

“They’ll be expecting us to try fighting whatever comes within a certain radius of us,” O’Brien commented.

“That’s my point,” Sisko told him. “They’ll be caught off guard if we act as mechanically as they will. The Jem’Hadar, the Breen—they haven’t got much in common, but one thing’s for sure—and that’s their collective lack of imagination. They’ve no doubt been told to expect surprises. It’ll confound them completely if we don’t give them what they expect. So let’s be as tenacious as pitbulls and see how far we get. One ship at a time—that’s the trick.”

“No glory,” Bashir commented with a noble smile.

“No heroes,” Odo agreed.

Sisko nodded. “Shields up. Red alert. Battle stations.”

Ezri’s voice quivered just a little on the PA. “Battle stations. All hands to battle stations. General quarters, all hands. Full red alert.”

They’d been wondering when he was going to order that. He had deliberately held off until the last sensible second, so they wouldn’t be poised for so long that the rush wore off. He needed that rush right now, not an hour ago.

The turbolift hissed open and spilled six more crewmen onto the bridge, backup and support teams for engineering, sensory, and tactical stations. These were the men who would’ve taken O’Brien’s, Ezri’s and Worf’s posts on a watch rotation. Now it was all hands on deck. Everybody had plenty to do. Every monitor now had a crewman manning it, spreading the duty out and letting each of them concentrate on specific readouts and breakdowns.

On the screen, the enemy formation continued to break up in an organized fashion, typical of programmed soldiers all taking orders from a few key braincores. That could work in the Allies’ favor—they weren’t really fighting dozens of smart, quick-thinking captains; instead, they were fighting only a handful of masterminds, perhaps Vorta, or even a Founder or two. That was the problem with central control—no variety. Sisko saw it immediately in the way all the enemy lines of ships moved in the same order, on both sides and the top and bottom of the egg-shaped assault formation.

The Allied fleet, though, was made up of a thousand time-tried captains, each clever in his way, each with different tactics and different experience. Every Jem’Hadar or Breen ship would find itself facing a completely unique set of talents. They wouldn’t be able to distill what happened, then carry that experience to the next ship and the next: what worked once wouldn’t necessarily work twice.

“Put some distance laterally between us and the starships,” he ordered.

“Aye, sir,” Nog nervously responded.

The Defiant hummed purposefully about them, and pressed off to port. Before them now were at least two dozen Breen fighters on full-impulse approach. The distance was closing fast.

“Pick one, Mr. Worf,” Sisko offered, “and fire when ready. Ensign, plot an intercept course, then be prepared to bear off on a pursuit vector.”

“I’m ready,” the helmsman claimed with false boldness.

Sisko didn’t say anything. Once they were actually shooting, actually chasing, something else would replace the fear he heard in Nog’s voice.

Despite his preparation, mentally and physically, Sisko flinched a little when he felt the energy of phaser fire blast through the coils and into open space from the Defiant. Their first shot in this ship—would she stand up to the pressure?

In the herd of rushing Jem’Hadar and Breen fighters, one Jem’Hadar ship heaved and crumpled into a ball of yellow fire.

“Good girl,” he murmured. “Excellent shot, Mr. Worf, pick another one—”

“Incoming!” someone shouted, and the ship rocked up on her starboard edge.

Emergency klaxons erupted. Hull breach!

“Plug it up, Chief,” Sisko said, charging O’Brien with making sure himself that their first hit wasn’t their last.

“Aye, sir!” O’Brien dodged for the forward lockdown, shoving an ensign out of the way.

“Pursuit, Ensign. Don’t let him get away with it.”

“Pursuing, sir!”

The ship surged mightily, still possessing all her power despite the hull hit. There wasn’t a sense of sluggishness now, that was for sure!

Nog spun them off in pursuit of a Breen fighter, and off the two ships went into space in a furious dance, as if held together by a string.

“I’ll say one thing for the Breen,” Nog said through gritted fangs, “they know how to pilot a ship.”

“So do you, Ensign,” Sisko told him. “Stay with him.”

“I’m trying, but he’s slippery!”

“Mr. Worf?”

“Unable to lock target,” Worf reported, frustration showing in his tone.

Suddenly, as the Breen ship ducked abruptly below the screen’s line of view, the Defiant jolted twice, hard, and the bridge filled with bitter smoke. One of the ensigns at the engineering deck went down in a cloud.

“We have two Jem’Hadar ships coming in behind us,” Odo reported over the whine of the vents, “bearing one-three-six mark four!”

“Evasive action, pattern Delta,” Sisko order, breaking his own advice to ignoring whatever came around behind them. One, yes. Two, no.

“Hang on!” Nog leaned into his helm.

“Worf, get one of those bastards!” Sisko called.

“Targeting” Worf answered, and instantly opened fire, laying down a scatter pattern that smeared one of the Jem’Hadar and skinned the other.

They watched as one of the enemy ships spun hideously, then blew itself to bits, spraying debris and energy wash over them and over the wobbling Jem’Hadar ship that had veered off in hopes of staying alive long enough to repair its damage.

“Well done, Ensign,” Sisko offered.

“I lost the Breen ship we were after,” Nog howled.

“I wouldn’t be too worried about it. There are plenty of others to choose from. Pick another one and advance. Damage control, to the bridge. Engineering, what’s the status down there? Report to Chief O’Brien. Worf, let’s have tactical display on both beams. Nog, full about. The battle’s back there!”

* * *

“I don’t care how many of their installations you target. You have to strike at their headquarters, or they won’t be crippled enough for it to have any real effect.”

Kira huddled over their one monitor and made her comments as if speaking directly to the little map of Cardassia City that showed on the flickering screen.

Damar appreciated her boldness as he scanned the map from her side. Now that they had decided what to do, they were severely stalled over just how to do it.

“That would be suicide,” he eventually concluded. “Besides, without the security protocols, we’ll never penetrate the outer defense perimeter.

“Damar,” Kira protested, “you must have some knowledge about their security protocols—something you haven’t thought of.”

“It’s not complicated enough to have forgotten much. I assure you, my personal codes are no longer valid.”

She sighed. “There has to be another way in. A back door, some weakness in their security system that you noticed….”

Think, she added without actually saying it.

Damar sifted through his years coming and going freely at Dominion Headquarters, a trusted aide de camp. He had never had to think about sneaking in or out or breaking in. In fact, he had never had to break in or out of anything. He’d pursued criminals in his time, recaptured others who’d done the breaking, but he had always arrived after the Cardassians already held a particular facility.

Now he had to learn to think differently—as Kira’s firelike eyes were now charging him. Over there, Garak was watching him with his wide-eyed glare also, expecting him to fail the task.

Think … what were the headquarters’ priorities? How would they change if there were a battle in space to pulling away the warders who normally stood watch around the perimeter? How would the troops inside be reassigned to make the most of their depleted numbers, if there were trouble on the planet and insufficient forces remained inside headquarters? What would he do if he were in charge? What entrances would he assume the citizenry might target, and which would he assume they knew nothing about? And which of those lesser temptations might go unprotected? Something a civilian would never think of?

“As I recall,” he began tentatively, “there is a rear cargo door that wasn’t heavily guarded….”

Kira instantly turned to Garak, who was saying, “We’ll need some kind of explosive device. I’ll get right on it.”

Before he could stand, Mila reached past him to his plate of half-eaten rations. “Elim, I remember when you used to love my cooking.”

“I still do,” Garak placated.

“You have a strange way of showing it. You’ve hardly touched your meal. No wonder you don’t look well.”

“Of course I don’t look well! I’ve been living in a cellar!”

Mila picked up Damar’s empty plate. “So has Legate Damar.”

“What about him?” Garak snapped.

“He finished everything on his plate, and it shows. Which explains why he’s fine handsome figure of a man.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I do,” Kira said with a catty smile. “Mila, I believe you’re falling in love.”

Mila actually blushed, her gray faced turning a distinct purple. “I’m old enough to be his mother.”

“Nonsense,” Damar spoke up.

Mila smiled at him, charmed by his favor. “He’s such a politician!”

Damar started to say something more, but the warning light from the upstairs alley entrance clicked on. It was Mila’s house—for anyone else to answer the door would be to give themselves away.

“Who could that be?” Garak explored.

Mila held up a hand. “I’ll find out.”

She trundled up the stairs and disappeared around the bend of the landing.

“One of our informants, maybe?” Kira wondered. “They’re all waiting for orders. We’ve put them on alert.”

“And I contacted all my former shipmates,” Damar said. “The ones I trust, in any—”

“You did what?” Kira rounded on him. “Did you tell them where we are? What we’re planning?”

“I told you, they were men I trust,” he insisted, angry that she would challenge him and yet not particularly surprised that she had. “We cannot possibly act alone, with only a few clusters of civilians moving with us, Colonel. We must have military backing if we are ultimately to succeed.”

Kira’s ink-dot eyes flared. “I think you overestimate your friends, Damar.”

“That is my decision. I am Cardassian,” he told her with sudden pride. “We understand conquest, and whatever you think about us, we understand struggle too. We never engaged in wholesale slaughter like the Dominion did today.”

Kira raised a warning hand. “This is a bad subject.”

“Yes, let’s change it,” Garak quickly agreed. “I’d rather worry about the actions we have to take tonight. I hope our regional operatives all have the nerve to go through with our plan, even if it means sacrificing another city.”

Damar drew a breath and slowly let it out. “I know it’s a grim plan, but we cannot allow ourselves to fall back because of a threat from Weyoun.”

“It’s hardly an idle threat,” Garak pointed out. “Weyoun is not one to play games, despite the sickening sauce of his manner. After all, he did wipe out a whole city of innocent civilians just to teach us a lesson. I have no doubt he’ll do it again.”

Damar ignored him and went to the foot of the stairs. “What’s taking her so long?”

Garak peered up the stairs. “I’m not sure….”

At the top of the stairs another door opened. Light flooded the stairwell—outdoor light!

Kira drew her sidearm. Some instinct had triggered her reaction. Damar pulled Garak back a step.

“Mila!”

Garak’s shriek was bloodcurdling. For an instant Damar almost scolded him for bellowing needlessly. Then, he saw the need.

Mila’s lifeless body came rolling down the stairs like some kind of hideous sponge falling off a ledge.

“Mila!” Garak shouted again, and plunged for the body of his old nanny.

Kira bolted, “Garak, look out!”

As Garak reached Mila’s body, a small metal device came looping down the steps.

“Concussion grenade!” Damar shouted, and dove for cover.

Kira grasped for Garak. That was the last thing Damar saw, as a flash of detonation engulfed the small quarters, punching them all backward in a blur of energy.

Flat on his back in a place that had no cover to duck for, Damar tried to roll over, but his paralyzed limbs mocked him. Even his eyes lay open, unable to blink. Kira was moving a few steps from him, her clawed hand crawling for her weapon, which lay somewhere over there … when a booted foot kicked away the weapon.

Motion flurried through the room. Kira seemed to float up into the middle of the air, then collapse into a chair.

Now Garak was floating by.

A bulging white face appeared in Damar’s vision, blocking everything else. Jem’Hadar!

Damar tried to raise his arms, and there was some groggy movement, but his body was still stunned and not under control. He was dragged to his feet, moved across the room to Kira and Garak, and deposited with them, as they too began to shake away the daze of the stun.

Captured!

CHAPTER

6

“I congratulate you, Thot Pran. The Breen’s worthiness in battle proves itself once again.”

The Founder looked with appreciation at the successful measures being taken in space, as broadcast to them by their forces now challenging the Allied invasion fleet.

“Founder,” Weyoun said from the other side of the monitor system, “more good news. Our troops have captured the traitor Damar.”

“Excellent!”

“That’s not all. Colonel Kira and Garak have been apprehended with him.”

“Even better.”

“Shall I have them brought here?”

She considered that, lingering briefly over the possibility of witnessing their execution herself and how much satisfaction that would provide. Also, though, it provided a chance for escape.

“What for?” she told him. “Have them executed immediately.”

Weyoun turned away. “With pleasure.”

When she was sure he could no longer see her face, the Founder indulged in a rarity. She smiled.

* * *

Dead. They were finished. The whole resistance was finished. The regional operatives would hold back their action until Damar gave the signal, and he was suddenly in no position to do so.

Two Cardassian guards loomed over Kira. Two Jem’Hadar kept watch on Garak and Damar.

That made some sense, Damar realized. They weren’t allowing Cardassians to watch other Cardassians. Sentiment might overtake someone. He had to give the Jem’Hadar more credit than he ever had before. They were beginning, in their programmed and limited way, to understand the nature of emotional beings. They had no intuition, but they had learned to anticipate the behavior of their enemies. He would have to remember this.

If he had a future from which to gaze back.

He noted Garak glancing at him, wondering if he had a plan to get them out of this. But Damar had no answer for him. He had genuinely thought their presence hadn’t been detected. Apparently he would never get the chance to become an even better rebel leader than he had managed so far.

The Jem’Hadar First was over there talking into his comm device and getting orders from his commander. Now he broke off, and came to face the three captives.

“On your feet,” he snapped.

“Why?” Kira defied. She didn’t get up.

The First nodded to his men, who reached down, clasped Kira by the collar and dragged her to her feet. Damar almost lashed out, but he had no chance against the armed guards. A moment, and he and Garak were also both against the wall at Kira’s side.

“We prefer our prisoners to be standing when they die,” the First announced, as if the Jem’Hadar had any traditions at all.

Damar glanced at the other two prisoners. They both looked at him, and each knew they had no way out of this.

Garak cleared his throat. “Does anyone have any final words?” he asked ridiculously.

Damar glared at the Jem’Hadar. “We may die, but Cardassia will—”

“Enough!” the First barked. “Final words are not permitted.”

Garak sighed. “How disappointing.”

The First stepped back. “Ready weapons!”

Kira raised her chin, staring death in the face.

Admiring her, Damar did the same. Even Garak was willing to stand death down without a whimper, and Damar had to give him respect for that.

Damar felt his eyes tighten. He refused to close them. He waited for the blast, calculating absurdly in his mind how quickly the body would seize up from an energy overload, what his muscles would do, how long his brain would sizzle, how much it might hurt to die this way. Perhaps the worst thing was seeing it coming, having to stand here and wait for it without being able to fight. He should lunge—at least die in a scuffle—

The blast brightened the cellar room in mockery of the pathetic lightsticks Mila had so dutifully provided. Damar held his breath. It took longer than he had expected.

Was this some kind of freezing ray? Why wasn’t he falling down? Or dissolving?

Before him, the two Jem’Hadar soldiers seized and fell. The First swung around and aimed his weapon at the two Cardassian guards he had himself brought in, fired and killed one of them. The other Cardassian, though, fired his own weapon, and the Jem’Hadar First buckled, rolled away, and lay dying seconds later on the cold stone floor.

“That’s for Lakarian City,” the remaining Cardassian growled. Kicking aside one of the Jem’Hadar at his feet, the Cardassian stepped over the body and came to Damar.

“Legate Damar, I am Ekoor. I pledge my life to free Cardassia from the Dominion!”

Giddy with pleasure at this turn, Damar clapped the newcomer on his shoulder and cried, “Welcome, Ekoor! Tell me—how many are with you?”

“Dozens,” Ekoor claimed instantly. “And hundreds more moment by moment. Weyoun’s announcement enraged Cardassians to wake up from our slumber.”

“Finally!” Garak gushed.

“Your resistance has shamed many of us,” Ekoor went on, rewarding Kira with a nod that seemed to indicate that he also understood who she was.

“Our armada has gone off to stand by the Dominion in the fight against the Allied fleet,” Ekoor said, “but we’re getting contacts now from many ship commanders. Weyoun—”

“Don’t tell me that fool broadcast his threat to the ships!” Kira burst out.

Ekoor nodded vigorously. “He did!”

“He doesn’t understand Cardassians at all,” Damar announced with contempt. “We will only collaborate so far. We will not be threatened.”

“Sounds familiar,” Kira grumbled.

Damar grasped Ekoor’s arm. “What are the commanders saying? Our ships—what are they saying!”

“Whatever they’re saying,” Kira interrupted, “we’ve got to get a message through to Starfleet and tell them about it. Ekoor, where’s the nearest planet-to-space communications system?”

“I know where it is,” Damar said. “Follow me.”

* * *

The edge of an abyss. Beyond, the abyss stretched nearly beyond sight, and at that point a sheer red wall rose. Dukat surveyed the surreal environment, its steaming gushers and unseen source of light despite the depths, and contemplated the alienness of Bajor.

“This is it, isn’t it?” he asked.

Nearly exhausted, Kai Winn paused to rest. “We’ve reached the end of one journey and stand ready to begin another.”

Yes, well, that was an answer to a simple question.

Dukat moved to the edge of the abyss and peered down into the spiraling canyon. Trite though it sounded in his mind, the pit really did look bottomless.

“What’s the matter, Dukat?” Winn pestered. “You look disappointed.”

“I know this sounds naive,” he allowed, “but I was expecting to see fire. After all, they are called the Fire Caves.”

“And with good reason.” She gathered her robes, knelt to the gnarly rocks, and put the Kosst Amojan down before her. Reverently she opened the enormous book, selected a particular passage, and closed her eyes.

She began to chant.

LANO KA’LA BO’SHAR LANU NO’VALA

PAHROM GARANA MOKAO BA’JAH

KO’SE NUSSO MA’KORA KAJANI …

LANO KA’LA KOSST AMOJAN!

* * *

Dukat frowned. He didn’t understand the words, and he wondered for a moment if she was leading him on.

That thought dissolved when the Fire Caves’s gaping abyss erupted into wall after wall of flames. Every tier was now burning as if giant curtains had been soaked in oil.

Such a sight! Breathless, Dukat absorbed the magnificence of mysticism and pondered the unrevealed science that made all this a wonder and a mystery. He felt as if the fires had come for him alone, to make him believe. The Pah-wraiths were sending him a message of victory. They would come if he freed them, they would go before him and knock down the Prophets and Sisko and the Federation and all its allies. The Cardassian Empire would gain its old greatness in the Alpha Quadrant. The name of Dukat would once again carry influence, instill fear, deserve respect.

This time, though, it would all be different. He would have his own respect, for a change.

Kai Winn opened her eyes. “Is that better?”

* * *

Derelict and wounded ships trailed sickeningly across the black skies all around. Some limped by, still firing, streaming leakage and flowing energy like life’s blood. Others speared through the damaged lines, scattering formations that struggled to recongeal. Two hours into the battle, and no side showed signs of retreat. Now the fighting at these speeds and with these maneuvers became far more dangerous, adding the very good chance of slamming headlong into a ship that no longer had the power to move out of the way.

Sisko snapped orders every few seconds, pausing in between to assess the ever-changing situation outside. He was trying to be Nog’s eyes and ears, for no one person could do it all. Nog had a very good ability to concentrate, but he had tunnel vision, and frequently concentrated too hard on one enemy while another slipped up behind him.

They were all working together, all watching, patching, fighting in their own way. Bashir hovered over a wounded man on the lower deck, the sixth emergency on the bridge alone, while funneling orders down to triage nurses on the lower decks.

“Captain,” Ezri called over the clatter and noise, “I have Admiral Ross.”

“Onscreen.”

The Admiral’s crackled figure appeared on the forward screen. Sisko couldn’t tell if it was Defiant’s damage or Farragut’s that was causing the disruption, though it didn’t matter.

“The Romulan flagship D’ridthau has been destroyed,” Ross said without formality. “Their entire line is collapsing”

“We’ll try to help,” Sisko offered.

“With what? Ben, we’re losing too many ships! We’ve got to find a way to turn the Dominion’s flank.”

“It’s too well protected,” Sisko assessed, knowing he could see the flank better from his position than Ross possibly could. “But their lines are spread pretty thin in the middle,” he offered as an alternative.

The Defiant took another hard hit, which luckily didn’t cut off the communication.

“You stick with the Romulans,” Ross told him. “Martok and I will hammer away at their center.”

“On my way.” He turned to Ezri. “Have attack fighters six-four and six-five follow us.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Jem’Hadar ship off the port bow!” Nog shouted as the ship took another rocking hit.

Sisko scanned the readouts on the starboard side from his place midships. They couldn’t plug any holes unless they could get out of here alive.

“Shields are down to sixty percent,” Worf reported.

Sisko almost said something about the shields, but O’Brien would be on it without prodding, and sixty percent was still a lot of deflecting power.

A second direct hit nearly threw them to their knees. Sisko clung to the helm, adding up numbers.

“Another Jem’Hadar!” Nog announced uselessly.

O’Brien climbed up from the lower trunks. “Diverting auxiliary power to port shield vectors!”

“Dax, we need some support from our fighters,” Sisko requested, far more calmly than he felt.

“Breen ship attacking off the starboard stern,” Nog reported, seeming to lose the will to shout anymore.

Just as well.

“Sir,” Ezri turned, “most of our attack fighters are either destroyed or under attack themselves.”

Sisko acknowledged with a dismissing nod, then turned to the helm. “You’re going to have to get us out of here, Ensign.”

“I’m trying, sir.”

Odo appeared out of a cloud of rank smoke from the ops console. “Sir, there’s a squadron of Romulan warbirds decloaking ahead, bearing one-seven-four mark one-three-nine.”

Ah, the cavalry.

“Make a beeline for them,” he ordered.

“On the way!” Nog said with a new cheer in his voice. “I just hope we get there in one piece.”

Around them dozens of Jem’Hadar ships and Breen fighters closed on Defiant. Sisko knew he’d been suckered—his reputation had preceded him. It would be a victory for them to take down the bulldog of Deep Space Nine, to destroy yet a second Defiant, and perhaps kill the crew that had stood them off for so long, sometimes single-handedly. He knew now that the holes had been punched in the Romulan lines to bait help from Starfleet, and he had attempted to answer that call. They knew he would.

Did they know how hard he would fight? He hoped so. Bring ’em on!

“Open fire,” he called. “Shoot at anything that gets in range. Never mind the shields. Everyone concentrate on firepower, understand?”

“Aye, sir!” Worf eagerly answered.

“Understood!” O’Brien said, and they went to work.

Shot after shot rolled from the Defiant, blasting herself a path in the cluttered pool of space. Several ships tried to get out of their way, which felt good, but three persistent enemy vessels dogged them mercilessly—two Breen, one Jem’Hadar. As they beat off two of them, one Breen ship gunned its power and came around underneath Defiant. Sisko saw it on one of the monitors, but there was nothing to be done with all working weapons and all sensors engaged on the two that had them by the tail.

He was knocked breathless by an abrupt surge of the whole ship a full length sideways. As he grasped the command chair and tried to recover, half the engineering console blew out toward him. Only a quickly raised hand shielded his face from hot sparks that seared the skin of his wrist and knuckles. As he blinked past the smoke, he was gripped by the nightmare of O’Brien collapsing to the deck, his shoulder a matte of blood.

Sisko hammered the comm link on his chair. “Dr. Bashir to the bridge!”

“Yes, sir?”

He turned—Bashir appeared in the vestibule. Psychic? Or just luck when they needed it most.

“You needed me, Captain?” Dr. Bashir spilled out of the lift and waved at the smoke.

Sisko just nodded toward O’Brien, who was miraculously crawling back into his chair.

“Chief caught a piece of shrapnel,” he called over the clatter and howl of battle. “Worf, shields aft!”

“Aft, aye.”

Julian Bashir choked his way across the bridge, dazzled briefly by the sheer weight of occurrences the captain was fielding, and bent over Miles O’Brien, who was gasping his way through waves of pain. Bashir recognized that in O’Brien—the engineer was trying to set the pain aside so he could get back to work. The gash in his shoulder had other ideas.

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” Bashir commented as he applied pressure to the bleeder.

“Just fix it, Julian,” O’Brien gasped. He reached up with his good arm and continued to work the panel in front of him, then winced in pain. “Careful!”

“Sit still or you’re going to wind up with one arm shorter than the other.”

The ship rocked sickeningly under them and for a moment Bashir had to stop what he was doing and hang on until the inertia turned him loose again.

“You’d do anything,” O’Brien grumbled, “to beat me at darts.”

“I haven’t lost a game to you in months.”

“I’m going to miss playing darts with you, Julian….”

Bashir frowned through the smoke at his friend’s blood-drained face. “What are you talking about? Your shoulder’s going to be fine.”

“I’m leaving DS9 … going back to Earth.”

Keeping a pressure pad on the wound, Bashir had a moment to absorb the shock. Had he heard right? Why would Miles go away?

“When?” he asked.

O’Brien coughed. “When the war’s over.”

Dealing with a wound of a different kind, Bashir dared the question whose answer he was afraid he knew. “Why?”

Sheepishly, O’Brien looked at him. “I’ve been offered a position at Starfleet Academy. Professor of Optronic Systems Engineering.”

Bashir sank back a bit. That wasn’t the answer to the question why.

“I see.”

O’Brien was still watching him, harder this time. The smoke was making their eyes water. “Well … somebody has to teach you officers the difference between a warp matrix flux capacitor and a self-sealing stem-bolt….”

“I suppose so.”

Bashir no longer looked at O’Brien, but concentrated on treating the wound, a convenient excuse to avert his eyes.

“Julian?”

“Yes.”

“I should’ve told you sooner. I couldn’t find the words. It’s just that Keiko—”

“Please, Miles. Let me take care of you.” Bashir felt his expression harden as he tried to suppress his emotions like a man. Tersely, unable to stop himself, he added, “While I still have the chance.”

A hard bolt slammed the ship from nearly dead ahead. O’Brien winced hard, bleeding from an artery.

“This is no good,” Bashir decided, tightlipped. “I’d better get you to sickbay.”

“I’m a little busy right now,” O’Brien resisted.

“That’s an order.”

“Look, Julian—”

On the main deck, Ben Sisko had been only half-listening, sifting for important words, and he caught the right ones. He cast his own words over there without looking at the two officers. “You heard him, Chief.”

With a sagging tone, O’Brien moaned, “Yes, sir….” at the same time as Nog reported, “Another Jem’Hadar to port!”

“Dodge them,” Sisko muttered. Would Nog be able to move fast enough? Could the ship wheel out of the way before that Breen got them targeted?

“Diverting auxiliary power to port shields,” Worf quickly attended.

“Dax,” Sisko called, “we need some support from our attack fighters.”

Another hit struck them from the wrong angle—Breen.

“Breen ship off the starboard aft!”

The Breen ship wheeled up on a wing, seemed to have them targeted, and then kindly exploded into a ball of roiling energy.

Sisko gasped, astonished. Had the Romulans come in?

“Did we do that?” he asked. Of course, he knew—

“Sir,” Worf interrupted, “I am reading Cardassian firing sequences in the Breen wreckage.”

On the heels of that, two Cardassian vessels veered in and blasted furiously at the Jem’Hadar pursuers, damaging one severely and blowing the other from now to Christmas.

Odo fingered the sensor panel. “Sir, the Cardassians—they’re attacking the other Dominion ships!”

Turning forward, Ezri stared at the big screen. “I think they’ve switched sides!”

“Yes!” Nog shouted.

Sisko cleared his throat of the raw chemical smoke. “It couldn’t have come at a better time. Come about and head for the center of their lines. This is our chance to punch through.”

Ezri frowned over her communications system. “From what I can pick up, it has something to do with a Cardassian city that was recently destroyed by the Dominion.”

“Are they sending those messages?”

“I’m not sure who’s sending them,” Ezri said. “I’m picking them up on Bajoran encoding.”

“Bajoran?”

“Now it’s switching to Starfleet codes. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know,” Sisko said. “Seems like somebody wants us to get the message as much as they want the Cardassians to get it.”

* * *

Grim realization came into the control room.

The Founder shuddered against her disease, but was more troubled by what she saw on the screens. Reports from space were changing in their tone, their results. At her side was Thot Pran, the Breen general, crackling with great disturbance. At the monitor, a stunned Weyoun gave the report he could not avoid.

“The ships are not responding to our hails,” he said. “The Cardassian fleet has turned against us.”

The Breen erupted into a violent hash of noise.

The Founder ignored his complaint. “Have our forces pull back and regroup at Cardassia Prime.”

Weyoun turned to look at her. “But, Founder, we’ll be completely surrounded. What if we have to fall back?”

“There’ll be no falling back. No more running.”

More rattling from the Breen.

She waited until he finished his ranting protest and avoided telling him what she really thought of him and all his kind, but on this issue she had to agree.

“We should’ve rid ourselves of the Cardassians at the first sign of rebellion. You’re right … it’s never too late to correct a mistake.” To Weyoun she added, “I want the Cardassians exterminated.”

The Vorta blinked as if he didn’t quite understand. “All of them …?”

“The entire population.”

“That’s going to take some time….”

“Then I suggest you begin at once.”

* * *

“Captain,” Worf barked, “the Dominion forces are retreating to Cardassia Prime!”

A cheer broke out through the crew, briefly setting aside their busy damage control and their efforts to keep injured shipmates from dying if it could at all be helped.

“Sir, Admiral Ross and Chancellor Martok would like to speak to you.”

Not entirely unexpected, though somewhat charming.

“I’m sure they would,” Sisko huffed. “Onscreen.”

The split screen appeared again, with the Klingon on one side and Ross on the other. Ross looked as if he’d been dragged through an engine feet first. His bridge was a smoky mess and one large piece of bulkhead material lay at an angle behind the command chair. Martok’s bridge was shattered too, but somehow for Klingons that looked normal. Martok himself seemed charged with delight.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Ross gasped, “but thank God for Cardassians!”

“It’s as I predicted,” Martok claimed. “The day is ours.”

“Not yet it isn’t,” Sisko warned.

Ross seemed annoyed. “Ben, we’ve won a great victory! We’ve driven the Dominion all the way back to Cardassia Prime. We can throw a blockade around the entire system and keep them bottled up there indefinitely.”

“What if they don’t surrender?” Sisko pointed out. “What if they use that time to rebuild their fleet?”

Martok didn’t give Ross a chance to say why that somehow wouldn’t work. “The captain has a point. The Dominion has displayed an ability to build ships at an impressive rate.”

“Gentlemen, do I have to remind you of our casualties?” Ross rasped. “We’ve lost a third of our fleet.”

“And we must see to it,” Martok told him, “that those soldiers did not die in vain.”

“Admiral,” Sisko offered, “if the Cardassians are joining us, we have an opportunity to put an end to this war once and for all.”

Sisko wanted to sit down over a table and make everyone calm down and pay attention. Ross had spent a lot of years behind a desk, working with theories instead of real losses, and today’s losses clearly shocked him. He would need time to absorb the meaning of a full-out fleet assault. Then he would have to be talked out of this wound-licking mentality.

“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 were 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 comfort 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.”

* * *

This was what the last two years of war had been building up to, what inevitably came if neither side of a conflict fell soon enough. This would be the one decisive upheaval, sink or swim, and neither side was thinking about tomorrow. There would be no holding back any more. Tomorrow, there would be nothing left with which to try again. The decision would be made today—here—and right now.

The Defiant led the way, as the strongest tight-maneuver vessel left in the Federation fleet. At their sides, Klingon and Romulan fighter wings pressed forward boldly. Backing them up were the remaining starships, support tenders, and any other vessel that could still hit and take some. The Allied Fleet was depleted by a third.

That figure did not change Sisko’s now-or-never commitment or dull his determination.

“Hold your fire until proximity distance,” he ordered. “We won’t get any second chances.”

“All systems ready, sir,” O’Brien reported.

Sisko understood what that meant. All systems were up to their top ability for the moment, even if that only meant thirty percent. He had to be ready to lose things much earlier than in the first-wave assault.

That meant adjusting his thinking process and his orders to compensate and improvise.

On the planet below, countless thousands of civilians were absorbing the brutality of the Vorta and Jem’Hadar extermination teams. An act of desperation on the part of the Dominion, yes, but there was also the taste of bitter vengeance in such wholesale slaughter. On the planet, a horror was playing out.

In space, the second horror now erupted.

The enemy ships did not come out to meet them, but forced the Allied Fleet to spread itself thin and circle as much of the planet as possible—and it was a very big planet indeed. Even seven hundred ships couldn’t cover so much area effectively, and within moments the sheer firepower of engaged vessels lit up space as if the Cardassian homeworld had become a nova suddenly torched in the night.

Defiant roared in slashing. Nothing was held back. No one was in the mood for restraint The bridge exploded into an unrecognizable wreck and no one cared. Sisko barked orders and authorizations, letting them free from anything that might make them hold back. The everbalanced triangle of life, risk, and cause, generally rocking on its tip, finally turned and slammed down upon its base. Die if we must, but make it cost. Our lives for something bigger, much better, and everlasting—possession of our own quadrant for everyone who comes after us. That is the code of the military branch of any civilization, and today it was the banner of the Defiant.

Shrapnel spun across the bridge from port to starboard as a Breen hacker got its teeth into them on a blunt pass. Sisko took a dozen slivers in the arm, brushed them off in a patch of blood, and dodged from position to position, doing things faster than he could order them done. There weren’t enough people left standing on the bridge to follow his orders anyway. All he needed was himself, Nog at the helm, Ezri, Worf, and O’Brien. The rest would have to be let go.

Every time a Breen or Jem’Hadar vessel veered into range, Sisko snapped, “Fire!” He didn’t even wait for the targeting computers. Worf gave up trying to aim by sensor and simply blanketed wedges of phaser fire into space, hitting something almost every time, even if once or twice they grazed another Starfleet ship or an ally. They were getting their share of friendly fire—that was unavoidable. It seemed that everyone accepted the chance of getting killed by a neighbor. With phaser and disruptor fire crisscrossing intervening space, there was no way to avoid getting struck by somebody’s something.

There was no sense or order, no coordination to the attack. In fact, that was an advantage. With all the wild-hearted Starfleet, Klingon, and Romulan captains bringing to bear their decidedly individual talents and experiences against the programmed uniformity of the Jem’Hadar and Breen, the Allied forces were almost impossible to predict and willing to be crazy.

“Worf, portside! Open fire! Ezri, compensate for the lateral shift! O’Brien, don’t move!”

He kept the orders running for each consecutive surge, keeping off the bow of this enemy ship, hugging the tail of that one, shooting, dodging, twisting, ducking. His arms and shoulders quivered with energy as his body charged to the task. He felt none of the wounds he knew had been inflicted upon him. Not a bruise ached, not a scratch burned. They were there, but he couldn’t feel them. That made him feel immortal, invincible. The fact that he could force by sheer will the acrid chemical smoke through his lungs as it poured from the ship’s damaged bridge conduits made him even more powerful.

* * *

“Captain!”

“Coming, Odo.”

Sisko made his way to the other side of the bridge, where Odo hovered over a flickering monitor.

“I may have found something interesting,” the constable said. “So far, Mr. Worf has managed to score direct hits on eleven Breen ships, but only three of those suffered significant damage.”

At tactical, Worf shot them an insulted glower. “It’s difficult to penetrate their shields. They appear to use stochastic field emitters.”

Odo peered past Sisko’s shoulder to the Klingon. “I’m not questioning your abilities, Commander.”

“What are you getting at, Constable?” Sisko prodded.

“All three ships that suffered damage were struck in the aft impulse manifold.”

Halleluja….

Sisko peered into the screen, making sure there hadn’t been some missed detail that could explain better. There wasn’t.

“Constable, you may have found a chink in their armor. Helm, find us a Breen ship. Mr. Worf, target—”

“I’ll target their aft impulse manifold.” Worf seemed both insulted and victorious. Not a bad combination for a Klingon.

Defiant veered hard over and whined in pursuit of the nearest Breen, locking onto its prey in seconds.

“Pull in tight, Ensign,” Sisko directed. “Three more degrees port … that’s better … z-minus two … fire!”

The weapons howled. Streaks of energy lanced through the Cardassian ionosphere like slicing the top off a cake, and drilled the back of the Breen ship. A few seconds—and FFFFWOOSH—obliterated.

Odo looked at Sisko, who looked at Worf, who was already looking at Ezri, who didn’t have a clue what all this meant.

Well, maybe she had a clue, but she hadn’t quite distilled it out of her memories yet.

“Dax,” Sisko began, “send a priority-one message to all ships. Let ’em know what we found!”

Now she got it.

CHAPTER

8

There it was—the cargo door. Dominion Headquarters’ rare weak spot.

“No guards,” Kira observed. Damar, she hated to admit, had called this one pretty well. “Our own private little Achilles’ hell.”

“Heel,” Garak corrected.

“No, I think I got it right the first time.”

Ekoor squatted near her. “Where are the guards?”

“Like the commander said,” Garak explained, “they’re probably off killing Cardassians.”

“Then this may be easier than we thought,” Damar said from the other end of the assault team.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Kira warned.

“We have a problem,” Garak pointed out.

“Only one?”

“But I’m afraid it’s a rather large one. That door is made of neutronium.”

Kira felt her shoulders sag. “Then the explosives we brought aren’t going to make a dent in it.”

Garak’s wide eyes rolled. “Now you see the problem.”

“What do we do?” Ekoor asked.

“I don’t know,” Damar said, “but I’m done hiding in basements.”

Garak rewarded him with a laugh.

“I fail to see what’s so funny, Garak,” Damar shot back.

“Isn’t it obvious? Here we are, willing to storm the castle and sacrifice our lives in a noble effort to slay the Dominion beast in its lair … and we can’t even get inside the gate!”

“We could knock on the front door,” Kira suggested, “and ask the Jem’Hadar to let us in—”

“Or send the female shapeshifter out to us,” Damar grumbled.

“Whichever’s more convenient.”

They looked at each other, and spontaneously laughed. It was kind of funny, right in the middle of this big ugliness.

“Well,” Garak reminded, “we do have to think of something….”

Kira nodded, but knew she couldn’t honestly blame Damar for the murderous gleam in his eyes. She’d spent all her childhood sneaking around, hiding, lurking, becoming an expert at strike-and-fly assault missions, guerrilla tactics, and resistance thinking—and she was the first to admit that a person could become absolutely excellent at it, but could never learn to love it. Damar had spent his life as a Cardassian military officer. This running and hiding was new to him and somehow degrading.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” she told them. Now that they knew their explosives wouldn’t scratch this door, they had to come up with another plan.

“What if I were to give myself up as a prisoner?” Damar offered.

“They’d kill you on sight,” Kira canceled.

“And us along with you,” Garak concurred.

She started to turn away, to find a route away from the Headquarters, or another less daunting portcullis to break through, when the cargo door abruptly slid open with a terrific screech. She ducked back into the shadows beside Garak. Damar and the others pressed into an opposite hiding place.

Together they watched as three Cardassian soldiers emerged from the Headquarters. In handcuffs!

“I know those Cardassians,” Damar whispered. “They’re part of Weyoun’s security force!”

What a strange sight—Jem’Hadar pushing Cardassians in irons!

Kira pressed closer to the wall and squinted. Yes, here came two Jem’Hadar, pushing the Cardassians out at gunpoint. Their rifles had bayonets fixed. Why?

The question answered itself after the Cardassians made a few steps into the alley. The Jem’Hadar offered no pause for thought or confession, nor did they even allow their prisoners to turn and face death head-on. They simply moved forward and drove their bayonets into two of the Cardassians, then shared the third, spearing the helpless natives through the spines.

Damar leaped to his feet, enraged. “No!”

“Damar!” Kira tried to grab for him, but he was gone, rushing into the alley, blanketing the Jem’Hadar with wildfire. The two Jem’Hadar went down hard.

Damar rushed past them and stormed the open cargo door. But the door was starting to close! And their presence here had been compromised.

“Charge!” Kira shouted, and raced after him.

Garak, Ekoor, and the other Cardassian conspirators vaulted from their hideout and clambered after her. Nothing left to hide. She was relieved to hear their boot-steps hammering behind her, that they hadn’t had a change of heart at the sight of the coldhearted slaughter exacted on their own people by the Jem’Hadar.

Kira and Garak, leading the group behind Damar, opened fire, blowing aside the shocked Jem’Hadar who appeared here and there in their path. The Jem’Hadar were built for space and clumsy on land, a factor which very swiftly washed in the resistance’s favor.

They broke inside the cargo door, into a brightly lit loading dock, with Damar boldly leading the way. He was driven to blind fury, and this was enheartening for all who followed him. They would get in! They would turn the tables here somehow!

They would blast their way past the half dozen Jem’Hadars who appeared in front of them!

“Hah!” Damar shouted insanely, and opened fire.

The Jem’Hadar were instantly attracted by his shout and opened fire themselves, all aiming at the single target who had drawn their shots. In an amazing flurry, Damar took combined bolts to the chest. Driven backward, he slammed into a wall, his face plastered with shock and rage.

The resistance fighters spread behind boxes of cargo, clearly stunned. Kira covered Garak as he bent at Damar’s side, his face crumpled and fearful.

“He’s dead,” Garak murmured.

She barely heard him. The news showed clearly in his astonished face.

Something happened to her—she recognized it. All Damar’s rage, insult, devotion, and pride transferred itself, like a soul changing bodies. He’d gotten them inside and now it was up to her. She was suddenly charged with the drive to take back Cardassia as if it were her own. How was that for a story to tell!

She spun on the hiding resistance fighters. “Get up! Remember Damar’s orders! We stop for no one!”

Shuddering with emotion, Garak rose to his feet, daring the fire from the Jem’Hadar, and turned to his fellow Cardassians.

“For Cardassia!”

Ekoor burst from hiding. “For Cardassia!”

Following the supercharged Ekoor, Kira and the others easily outmaneuvered the Jem’Hadar guards—and Damar had been right, there weren’t as many as there should have been—freely blowing them to piles of flesh and plastic tubing all the way through the Headquarters.

None of this building was familiar, and Kira found it disconcerting to race through unfamiliar corridors with such directioned purpose—evidently Ekoor did know his way, for he led them at full tilt without so much as a pause at a corner or a hesitation to remember the right way.

Alarms began to ring. Security alert. They were aware of the breach now. She knew the sound of that. So much for subtlety.

She kept firing, trying not to hit Ekoor, who continued to roar through the corridors, blind with fury. He was firing wildly, hitting every Jem’Hadar he spied. At that imprudent rate his weapon would be drained any second now and he’d be helpless.

“Get the explosives, Garak! Ekoor!” she called. “Come forward here, get ready—”

“We’re ready,” Garak called. In both hands he held not his weapon, which he had handed to Ekoor, but the grenades.

“This door!” Ekoor shouted. “This one! Hurry!”

Ekoor fired foolishly at the door, causing a dangerous backwash of energy from the shielded panel.

“Stop!” Kira shouted. “Garak, the grenades!”

“Coming!”

“Take cover!”

They spread out. Two seconds, and a concussion blast nearly took their heads off.

Kira shook away the blur and dove through the smoking wreckage where a moment ago there had been a door. She opened fire even before she had a target, and felt the hot buzz of shots whizzing by her. In a cloud she saw one Jem’Hadar fall. Another, though, got his weapon up and fired, killing one of Ekoor’s Cardassian recruits. Following the trajectory she thought she’d seen, Kira fired again. The second Jem’Hadar crashed to the floor.

She plowed into the briefing room and leveled her weapon joyously at the flaky face of the female shapeshifter who had so often compromised Odo. Ah!

“Contact the Jem’Hadar fleet!” Kira ordered. “Order it to cease fire!”

Garak stepped forward, again holding his weapon and aiming now at Weyoun’s astonished glare. “And order the Jem’Hadar troops on Cardassia to lay down their arms immediately.”

“He’ll do no such thing,” the female shapeshifter said. At her words, the Vorta dutifully regained control over his expression.

Kira moved to a position allowing her to cover both Weyoun and the shapeshifter in one shot. “Garak, check the monitors. What’s going on in space?”

Garak was as comfortable with the Cardassian mechanics as he had become with the workings on Starfleet ships. Instantly he had the readouts displayed on three monitors.

“I’m not reading any Breen ships in close proximity to the planet,” he said. “There’s a trail of Breen exhaust leading out of the solar system. Looks like the Allies have them in retreat.”

“Cowards,” the female shapeshifter commented bitterly. “First the Cardassians, now the Breen. This proves what I’ve said all along—solids are not to be trusted.”

“The Jem’Hadar haven’t abandoned us,” Weyoun claimed. “They’ll fight to the death.”

“There aren’t enough of them on the planet,” Kira told him. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

Weyoun glared coldly at her. “Tell me … where is my old friend Damar?”

“Damar’s dead,” Garak announced before Kira could stop him from speaking up and tipping any hand they had in their favor.

“A pity,” Weyoun said.

Garak’s bitterness got the better of him. “He died helping to free Cardassia.”

The Vorta tilted his head. “What’s left of it.”

Garak’s anger boiled over. He raised his weapon to Weyoun and fired at point-blank range. This time Kira had no inclination to stop him at all.

As her loyal follower collapsed to the floor, the shapeshifter regarded him unemotionally. “I wish you hadn’t done that. That was Weyoun’s last clone.”

Garak sneered, “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Kira stepped forward. “The war’s over. You’ve lost.”

“Have I?” the shapeshifter challenged. “I think you’ll find the Jem’Hadar don’t agree with that assessment. They’ll continue to fight to the last man.”

“What will that accomplish?”

“Isn’t it obvious? To make sure your ‘victory’ costs you as many ships and as many lives as possible. When the next Dominion fleet comes through the wormhole, there’ll be no one—not the Federation, not the Klingons, not the Romulans—who’ll be strong enough to stop us.”

Kira pressed down a shudder at the prospect. “That’s an empty threat.”

Clearly weakened by her sickness, the shapeshifter sank into her chair. She seemed too tired to argue. She leaned back in her chair, her demolished face strangely content.

“Is it? … We’ll see,” she uttered. “In the mean time, more of your ships will be destroyed, and your casualty lists will continue to grow. By the time it’s over, you will have lost so many ships, so many lives … that your victory will taste as bitter as defeat.”

* * *

“We’ll launch a three-pronged attack,” Admiral Ross explained. “The Romulans and our new Cardassian allies will engage the Jem’Hadar forces. The Klingons will target the Breen, and the Federation will take on the orbital weapons platforms. Any questions?”

Only one question slapped back and forth in Ben Sisko’s mind, like tide knocking on rocks. “When do we go?”

“As soon as everyone’s in position.”

“It will be a glorious battle,” Martok claimed on his half of the split screen.

“But a costly one,” Ross said unhappily. “Estimates project our casualty figures could be as high as forty percent And God knows how much higher they’ll go once we send in our ground forces.”

Fearful that Ross might be talking himself out of this offensive, Sisko quickly said, “The Dominion’s beaten and they know it. But they’re going to make us pay for every kilometer of that planet.”

He hoped his tone communicated that he was willing to pay, and to take out of the enemy forces every pound of flesh they exacted from his own side.

“Yes, they will,” Ross said, then did not make any further complaints or voice any doubts. “Godspeed,” he added.

Chancellor Martok wrapped up their session in what might be the last word they would ever hear from each other.

“Qa’pla!”

* * *

In the flaming cavern, waiting for their great reward, Dukat and Winn joyously poured wine from a flask into a ceremonial goblet. Dukat watched the dark liquid flow and thought of Federation blood.

“What is it?” he asked, still holding the Kosst Amojan.

“This?” Winn raised the goblet. “This is the most important part of the ceremony.”

She held the goblet high above her and chanted …

TARNA PU-ONO ULL-KESS PAH-RAN

LANO KA’LA BO’SHAR LANU….

She lowered the goblet, preparing to drink, and as the warm brass touched her lips she stopped and turned instead to Dukat.

“After you,” she offered, beaming at him.

Gently Dukat set the book down, quite frankly glad to be rid of it, and bowed before her. “I’m honored.”

The wine was sweet and warm, with an exotic pungence that coiled its way down his throat and seemed to effervesce. He had never tasted anything like it and suspected it had been part of the Kai’s private cellar for many years. Certainly this was a special enough occasion …

“Now you,” he offered.

Winn smiled, took the goblet, and smelled the wine indulgently.

Rather than drink it, though, she leered at him and poured the remaining liquid to the bubbling cavern wall. It sizzled in the heat from the flaming abyss.

Dukat stepped back from her. Why would she refuse to share the sacrament?

Raw pain bolted through his intestines. The wine burned its way deeper and deeper into his body. He choked, nearly heaved, but nothing came up. Reaching for Winn, seeking support, Dukat slipped forward and fell to his knees. Shock gripped his throat. He could no longer stand!

Winn backed away from him, refusing him any support. Why did she look like that? What was that glow in her eyes?

“Why—” he gagged.

Winn outstretched her arms, but not to him.

“Because,” she began, speaking loudly, “the Pah-wraiths demand a sacrifice! Someone worthy of them … devious and cruel … twisted and corrupt … whose soul lusts only for power and vengeance!

“Who better … than you!”

She smiled.

As Dukat’s insides began to wither, he stared in horror at her joy and fulfillment, the pure love and unmatched hatred jousting in her face.

“That’s why you were sent to me,” she told him, “so that darkness could feed on darkness, hate on hate! Your death will be the key that brings forth the Restoration of the Pah-wraiths!”

The hot ground came up and embraced him. He tumbled onto his back. Towering over him, Winn’s form seemed enormous, elongated, stretching higher and higher into the vaulted flames which lit her wide face. He reached for her. The fires rose higher. His hands burned, withered to black, blew to cinders. As a searing curtain closed slowly around his vision, Dukat saw through his paralysis the last moments of sacrifice, and heard the last words of the depraved life he had so abused.

“I offer you this life for your nourishment! This martyr to feed your hunger! May it fuel the fires that will set you free! Kosst Amojan! I am yours! Now and forever! Now and forever! Now and forever … now and forever … forever….”

CHAPTER

9

Odo held his silence with great difficulty, as he watched Kira Nerys make her report on the viewscreen to Captain Sisko. What torture it was to keep his emotions in check! She was alive, she was alive … the bird and the fish—was there a place for them to live together?

“I’m very glad to find you in one piece, Commander,” Sisko was saying to her.

“Very glad,” Odo murmured.

He hadn’t thought he’d spoken very loudly, but Kira looked at him and seemed relieved to see him clean of the Changeling disease. Her kind smile embolded him, and he smiled back.

The ship rocked from another hit—yes, they were still in the middle of the battle, but somehow it seemed less consequential now that he knew Kira was alive and in charge of Dominion Headquarters.

“What’s your status?” Sisko asked.

Kira shrugged meagerly. “Only three of us made it to the briefing room.”

“What about Damar?” Odo asked.

“He’s dead.”

Sensing the subject changing, Sisko changed it back. “Is your position secure?”

“I don’t think the Jem’Hadar will attack. They won’t risk endangering the Founder. She’s in pretty bad shape … she won’t speak to anyone … just sits at her desk, deteriorating.”

At tactical, Worf spoke for the first time. “If she dies before ordering the Jem’Hadar to surrender—”

“They’ll fight to the last man,” Sisko finished.

“There’s another problem,” Kira offered. “When the Jem’Hadar realize what’s happened, they’ll storm the building. They’ll try to rescue their ‘god.’”

“We’ll beam you out of there.”

At the engineering console, O’Brien turned from where Bashir was still cauterizing his shoulder wound. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, sir. I’ve locked onto their biosignatures, and according to these readings the Changeling won’t survive the trip.”

“I agree,” the doctor said, looking at O’Brien’s monitor. “Her morphogenic matrix is too unstable.”

Odo stepped to the captain’s side. “Sir—Captain, I’d like to beam down as well.”

Sisko watched the screen. “I understand you want to help Kira, but—”

“It’s not that.” Not all that. “I want to talk to the Founder. I might be able to reason with her.”

“You haven’t had much success reasoning with her in the past,” the captain rightly reminded him, courteously holding back the fact that, actually, Odo’s attempts had turned out to be downright disasters.

“I’d still like to try.” He refrained from pointing out that things had changed—that the female was dying, which would alter anybody’s outlook, and that he had things in mind which Sisko would not find particularly comforting.

The ship shook again, saving him from having to explain.

Instead he quickly added, “Think of the lives it might save.”

“Point taken,” Sisko said. “Good luck, Constable.”

Sisko shrugged, not about to be put off at this late hour. “Commander, tell the Founder that Odo would like to pay her a visit.”

“The more, the merrier,” Kira accepted.

The ship rolled again, then pitched forward. Another hit. The Jem’Hadar weren’t giving up. In dismay Odo watched as the comm screen cut off the view of Kira and went again to the view of space, showing relentless Jem’Hadar ships sweeping around them at all angles.

Sisko turned to Ezri. “Contact Admiral Ross and tell him we need to secure that facility.”

“I’m on it,” she responded.

* * *

Odo hurried to the transporter room, collecting six Starfleet security guards on his way through the ship—and given the casualties and the action still going on, it wasn’t easy to get the department heads to give up manpower. Six guards with phaser rifles would be sufficient to guard the facility until more could be available.

“We’ll have to beam down in two waves, sir,” Ensign Bremerton told him as they crowded into the Defiant’s little transporter room. “Systems are damaged and we don’t want an overload.”

“Very well,” Odo accepted, and started for the pad.

“Sir—” The ensign stopped him by stepping up there first, having the common sense not to actually touch him. “With your permission, sir, I think three guards should go down first, and secure the situation before you have to go down.”

Odo surveyed the young man’s bruised face. “Ensign, I have been for many years the senior security officer on board a fully armed deep-space outpost. Are you telling me I can’t handle the first wave of a landing party?”

The young man came suddenly to attention. “No, sir! It’s just that … we just all thought you might … want somebody else to have a look around down there first.”

So. His situation had not been a secret among his security teams. He had underestimated the intimacy of life at Deep Space Nine.

His instinct to lash out and claim his prowess and self-control subsided as he studied the young security man’s expression and the deep sympathy he saw there. In it was reflected their loyalty to him, their sorrow that they couldn’t protect him perhaps as he had always tried to protect them by indeed going first into every situation.

“Ensign,” he began, “yes, thank you … but whatever is down there, I cannot shy from it. I will lead the first wave. You follow me, and beam directly to the outer perimeter of the building. Signal us when you believe the entrances are secured.”

Bremerton nodded sadly. “Aye, aye, sir. Whatever you say.”

Odo led two other beefy guards into the transporter and steeled himself for the nauseating process of beaming. Unlike with solids, the transporter usually seemed a bit fitful and confused at trying to rearrange the molecules of a Changeling, and he always had to fight to hold form just as he was being reconstituted.

Using the coordinates supplied by Kira, he was able to beam directly into the corridor outside the briefing room.

Kira was there waiting for him, and charged into his arms with a passion that drove him wild with joy and sorrow. He clutched her slim form against his and wished she had more meat on her bones so there would be more to hold. The fear of her death came to its full flowering and broke to the wind. He hadn’t let himself think she might be gone until finally he saw that she wasn’t. The sensation of victory nearly overwhelmed him.

When his head stopped swimming, he noticed that the two guards had dutifully taken positions outside the briefing room door.

Kira drew back from a heart-drowning kiss and gazed at Odo happily.

“Nerys,” he murmured.

“It’s been a while,” she said, not quite joking. She lowered her voice. “Watch yourself … I don’t trust her.”

He looked down at her. “But you trust me, don’t you?”

“Of course!”

“That’s all I need to know.” Odo peered down at her, cupping her knobby shoulders in his hands.

Yes, he was sure. All his decisions had been made. He had weighed all the consequences both larger and smaller than himself, and he knew what he wanted.

In the briefing room, Garak stood with another Starfleet guard. “Constable,” he greeted tightly.

Odo nodded. “Garak.”

And there, in the chair, was the female of his own kind with whom he had shared so many dreamlike moments.

She looked up to see him. Her face was a demolished mask of illness and dessication. He pitied her deeply. She must be in indescribable pain, yet there was serenity in her eyes. Whatever her fate, she was taking it courageously.

“You’re looking well, Odo,” she said. Her voice was tight.

“Thank you for seeing me,” he said sincerely.

“It’s always good to see you. But don’t think even you can change my mind. I have no intention of surrendering my forces. If I did, it would be a sign of weakness … an invitation for the solids to cross into the Gamma Quadrant and destroy the Great Link.”

So that was at the bottom of her stubbornness—expecting others to act with the same ruthlessness she and their kind had shown.

“Believe me,” he told her, “I’m well aware that the Federation has its flaws, but a desire for conquest isn’t one of them.”

She offered him the smallest of shrugs. “And what of the Klingon and Romulan Empires? Can you make the same claim for them?”

He glanced at Kira. “The Klingon and Romulan Empires are in no shape to wage a war against anyone. Besides … the Federation wouldn’t allow it.”

The female shuddered momentarily, then regained control. “The Dominion has spent the past two years trying to destroy the Federation … and now you’re asking me to put our fate in their hands?”

“Yes.”

A very simple answer … the one word communicated all his faith in the civilization in which he had lived for so many more years than the last two.

She paused, reading his eyes, but in the end she rejected what he said.

“I can’t do that, Odo. I don’t share your faith in solids.”

For that, too, he was ready.

With one final glance at Kira, at the bird who should be free to fly, Odo reached for the female of his own kind.

“Perhaps I can change your mind. Link with me.”

CHAPTER

10

“Odo, what are you doing!”

Though Kira’s protest certainly did have its effect upon him, Odo had not a thought of changing his mind. He knew she didn’t understand yet what was motivating him to dare the heretofore tricky and threatening link with this dangerously enticing creature from his own world.

Until now he had been the child, always at risk, drawn by the intrigue of the adult who tempted him away from his safe street corner. This wonderful day, for the first time, things were very different.

Kira, who loved him and wanted to protect him, had no way of knowing that. She had no way of knowing the depths of his conviction this time. He could never hope to explain it to her in simple human words. There would have to be another kind of understanding between them.

Before this, in every Link he had attempted, he had always been thinking about himself, the mystery of his origins, the otherworldly nature of his abilities, and the differences between himself and the solid beings who had embraced him as one of their own. Exploring the vast clutter of fantasies allowed him when he discovered what he was—a Changeling, a shapeshifter, part of that great merged Link of millions of other souls that freely intertwined. The revelation had been shocking, and had filled him with questions.

Since he could remember he had been a single entity, alone in his unusual body, just like all the other people around him. All at once he had been told he wasn’t alone, that he could blend, share, flow with a whole civilization, that instantly they would know him and he them. An extended family beyond anyone’s idea of extended families, the shapeshifters were an entire race that could freely merge, separate into individuals, then merge again, giving a whole new meaning to the word “alien.”

After a lifetime alone—individual, vulnerable—Odo now knew that he could merge with them and not lose his singular personality. He would keep his private self. They could never drive him to the blended ecstasy of artificial togetherness and make him forget who he was. Never again.

So he wasn’t afraid or hesitant This time he would merge on his own terms, and he would be the one in charge.

“I’m afraid I can’t Link with you,” his counterpart said. “This disease prevents me from changing my form.”

He offered his hand. “If we Link, I think I can cure you.”

Garak didn’t step toward them, but did say, “That’s a very bad idea, Constable.”

Kira, on the other hand, did come closer. “I’m afraid I have to agree with Garak.”

Odo glanced at Kira. “Nerys, I know what I’m doing.”

And there isn’t time to make you understand. People are dying.

“Take my hand,” he said to the other Changeling.

“And if you do cure me? What will you ask in return?”

“All I ask is that you Link with me.”

Garak brandished his weapon again. “I’m warning you, Odo—”

Imploringly, Odo looked at Kira. Would she have faith him, as he had asked?

Kira stepped back and motioned Garak back also. “Lower your weapon, Garak.”

“I don’t think so,” he refused.

Moving sideways, Kira simply put her hand on his rifle and pushed it down. “I said put it down.”

“Why?”

“Because I trust Odo.”

Overwhelmed with affection and gratitude, Odo was warmed with confidence. He lifted his hand to the female Changeling. He was giving her no choice. She would accept this, but on his terms. They were for the first time on completely equal terms. No—better than that. He, for the first time, was superior in ability.

After a few seconds she summoned the strength to raise her hand to his. With ease that surprised even Odo, he wished a blending and it happened. His hand liquefied and engulfed hers, assisting her in morphing the sickened flakes and the mottling of her diseased limb. Starfleet had the cure and had given it to Odo, and then quite wisely and bravely elected not to share it with the ugly culture of the beautiful Changelings.

Why?

Because they didn’t deserve it. They were using their abilities to conquer and repress others, a decidedly less noble cause than their lofty super-ideal of themselves should have embraced. They could not be superior if they would not treat others with mercy and respect. Starfleet had been right. Odo was going to show her what the “lowly” Federation had that the Changelings had not been able to develop for themselves.

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 moment 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.

Ezri’s eyes glittered happily. “You helped him become chancellor … you can’t very well turn your back on him now.”

Disarmed by that, Worf looked at Sisko. “My first loyalty is to you, Captain!”

Sisko blushed inwardly at the idea that he could stimulate more devotion than a whole empire waiting in the wings. “I’ll probably regret this in the morning, but if this is something you want, then by all means….”

He offered a little shrug that clinched the deal.

Absorbing too much too fast, Worf caved to the pressure of all those surrounding him, but kept his eyes fixed on Sisko and held his breath. “It has been a great honor to serve with you, sir,” he offered sincerely.

Sisko nodded to him. “The honor was all mine.”

After a pause, Worf turned to Martok, still holding the same breath. “I accept.”

Martok bowled forward and embraced him in a big Klingon way. “An ambassador who will go targ hunting with me! Maybe being chancellor won’t be so bad after all!”

And he broke into a fierce laugh.

Ezri touched Worf’s arm. “Congratulations, Worf.”

Sisko watched as her eyes filled with tears, then she almost immediately regained control over herself. She went up on her toes to kiss Worf on the cheek and give him a hug—as friends.

It was good to see. And Sisko needed something that was good to see.

* * *

“When will you be going?”

Kira was warm and tender on Odo’s arm as they strode along as if nothing were wrong.

“In a day or two,” he told her, hoping it sounded wise.

“You could come back,” she suggested carefully, “after you’ve cured your people….”

“Nerys,” he said, stopping that line of thought, “I hope you know my feelings toward you haven’t changed. But my people need me. They need to know what I know, learn what I’ve learned from living among solids. It’s the only way they will ever learn to trust you.”

“You don’t have to justify your decision to me, Odo,” she said.

He appreciated her for that. She wasn’t dismissing herself from loving him, or claiming that she wasn’t a big enough part of her life to deserve an explanation. She was telling him, in her way, that she knew he had a good reason, something beyond his own personal satisfactions.

Strange, but he knew she would have protested before this, because she was worried about the effect the Link would have on him. This lack of protest proved that she understood, or at least suspected: it would be Odo affecting the Link from now on, not the other way around.

“There’s only one thing I ask,” she added.

“Name it.”

“That we spend your last few days as a solid together. I want to take you back to your homeworld.”

Her bravery and bittersweet faith in him almost knocked him over. She was giving not only her love, but her blessing.

“I’d like that,” he said, and almost couldn’t speak. “I’d like that very much.”

* * *

Heat, flame, ecstasy.

The Fire Caves burned and swam with concoction. She could hear her own voice, but as if disembodied, louder and louder, echoing now.

DOORA TOLKA BRE-TRI PAH-WRAN

DOTTA TOLKA O-CHEN DOORA TOLDA

WEY-DAY SHAYHAL!

She was half insane, her voice cracking, her skin slimy with sweat, her clothing damp and hanging, but the chant rose within her with a power she could never have imagined before! Over there, Dukat’s lifeless body lay in sacrifice to the Pah-wraiths. They would come! They would come to her! She had done everything they could possibly want!

The flames! The fires of the abyss rose over her head into unnatural spirals! The Pah-wraiths! They were hearing her!

Kos’se nusso ma’koran kajnani

preen dah-ono uka’lamor eye anu!

Kosst Amojan! I await you! Come to me!

The energy spiral gained speed, raced, flew, ran, surged over her head. She stretched out her arm to it, seeking the blessing of the Pah-wraiths, whom she herself had freed from their prison.

They would adore her! They would favor her! Energy spears darted all around the vaulted ceiling of the Fire Caves, all at her bidding. She was the greatest conjurer!

A spear of flame came down like a javelin and struck her in the heart. Their power was too great—the javelin slammed her backward into the hard wet sizzling wall.

Plastered there, she was helpless to raise her arms again. Her unblinking eyes saw the flames take on a living shape, springing and darting in their exuberance. But they were making a mistake.

The javelin vectored away from her, denying her the power.

Instead, it went to Dukat and drove itself into his open mouth, surging, surging into his body. But he was the sacrifice—she had brought him to them!

They were making a mistake. A mistake!

As her shuddering legs betrayed her and she began to slip down to the cliff shelf, Winn’s burning eyes remained open and her brain remained aware, though her limbs were leaden and her heart had seized up.

Before her, on the shelf at the brink of the flaming abyss, Dukat’s body shook from within. Its eyes flew open with unworldly power. There, in his eyes, she saw the life force of the Pah-wraiths.

They had chosen him and not her. They had come, they were here. They were free.

CHAPTER

12

Vic’s Lounge, inside Quark’s Lounge, a little bit of unreality inside a place of, some would argue, equal illusion. Eh, well, the 1960’s had their charm—didn’t they?

Barbie Dolls and cars with fins, beatniks and bongos, and something called go-and-go boots.

Quark entered the bar-in-a-bar and was greeted by Vic Fontaine.

“Hey, pallie! If you’re here for another game of go fish, I’m a little busy right now.”

“Actually,” Quark told him, “I’m here for the end-of-the-war-goodbye-Chief-O’Brien-goodbye-Odo party.”

“Over there, at the bar.”

“Thanks.”

Yeah, there they were. Sisko, his wife Kasidy, Kira with Odo, Worf more or less by himself in a crowd, O’Brien, Dr. Bashir, Ezri Dax, and Jake Sisko. Nice bunch of bananas. They all looked perfectly content, even happy. Well, except Worf. He wasn’t howling yet.

“I’m serious, Miles,” Dr. Bashir was saying as Quark approached, “I envy you. I really do. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities on Earth.”

“Earth’s got lots of wonderful cities,” O’Brien said. “Every city on Earth has its own personality. Now, just let any other planet make that claim. And country! Do we have country. Canyons and grasslands and forests and redwoods and—”

“Miles, have another drink.”

Quark muscled his way between Sisko and Ezri. “May I have everyone’s attention please? Attention, please! In appreciation for all that you’ve done to end the war and save the Alpha Quadrant, the Promenade Merchants’ Association has voted to pay the costs of your holosuite visit this evening.”

The crowd of DS9ers cheered at themselves and Quark got a few good slams on the back.

“That’s very generous of them,” Ezri said.

Jake Sisko leaned forward. “Who are they paying, Quark?” he asked.

“Me, of course! And since they’re being so generous, I’m charging them double.”

Nobody seemed surprised. After all, he knew it was a great idea. Maybe he could market it.

Hmm….

“So,” he went on, “eat all you can, drink even more, and stay as late as you like.”

Sure—the more they ate, the more they drank and the later they stayed, the bigger the bill.

“Don’t worry, Quark,” Bashir said. “It’s going to be a long night. There’s a lot of good-byes to be said. To Miles and Odo and Worf—”

“Worf?” Quark swung around to the Klingon. “Where are you going?”

“It does not concern you, Ferengi.”

Ezri smiled and patted Worf’s enormous hand. “Worf’s been made Federation Ambassador to Kronos!”

“You?” Quark swung around again. “A diplomat?”

Worf scowled, then decided to admit, “That was my first reaction.”

Ben Sisko beamed at his favorite hunk of granite and raised his glass. “But Admiral Ross and Chancellor Martok wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Quark bothered to fill all their glasses as long as they weren’t really paying attention, and distracted them by asking, “Anybody else leaving that I should know about?”

O’Brien reeled back and proclaimed, “I didn’t know you cared, Quark.”

“I don’t. If you want to spend the rest of your life on that rotating ball of boredom called Earth, that’s fine with me. I just don’t like change, that’s all.”

Bashir laughed aloud, as if that meant something.

“Well,” Sisko said, “you better get used to it, because things are going to be pretty different around here.”

Perhaps he hadn’t meant it heavily, but his words threw a pall over the occasion. Suddenly they all seemed to realize they were celebrating the breakup of long-time acquaintances. Quick—pour more drinks before they all get depressed!

Odo broke the threatening mood. “What ever were we talking about before Quark showed up?”

Kasidy caught the ball. “How much Julian loves San Francisco.”

“That’s right” Bashir plowed on. “The Bay, the bridge, the restaurants, the painted-lady houses, Big Sur, Monterey, the antique street cars, all that history … you’re going to love it, Miles.”

“I sure will,” O’Brien said. “But it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment at first—”

“Nonsense!” Bashir cut off. “You’ll have your students, your family—think of all the quality time you can spend with Molly and Kirayoshi … the long, romantic walks with Keiko through Golden Gate Park….”

Kasidy gazed at Sisko. “Sounds wonderful,” she uttered.

“It is wonderful!” Bashir proclaimed. He pressed a hand to O’Brien’s shoulder. “You lucky devil. Bartender! Another round for my friends here!”

When the bartender didn’t respond right away, Bashir drifted off down the bar to hail the service in person.

O’Brien watched him go, appearing happy and content about the break-up.

“He’s taking it better than I thought,” he mentioned, knowing he was probably about to jinx the whole attitude. “My leaving and all….”

Ezri, typically, found the truth much more comforting than a fluffy deception. “Are you kidding? He’s dying inside.”

Sadness pressed in on O’Brien no matter how he tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

“I know how he feels,” he said.

But did he? He was going off on a new adventure. Teaching, Earth, home life, safety … yes, these had their kind of adventurous nature. They had their attractive wonderment. There was challenge in making things work, showing young minds how to make things happen, in raising a contented child, providing security for his wife and kids. He was starting to feel a whole other kind of intimidation and anticipation: stare down the barrel of a thirty-year mortgage and say that guy’s not a hero. A good honest job, leaving the glory-mongering to the young upstarts. He did like the idea. There was a challenge there and he was looking forward to it. He knew the captain and Ezri Dax and the others would be all right without him, despite the fact that he’d been taking care of them all these years, making sure they had air to breathe and propulsion when they needed it … only Bashir worried him.

Julian was hiding something, burying his real feelings—Ezri was right about that. Even a new love couldn’t replace the security of old friends. O’Brien knew he’d been wrong to hope so. He knew, and felt awful, that Bashir was determined to be happy for him and not make him feel bad.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”

Vic Fontaine raised his hands and gained everyone’s attention from where he stood at the front of the jazz band.

“This is a very special night for some friends of mine,” he began. “They’ve been together a long time, but like the man said, nothing lasts forever. Gang,” he added, looking over to them, “this one’s from the heart. One … two….”

The tune was jazzy, cheery, yet the words gripped O’Brien and most likely all of them with the firm hand of melancholy. They really were breaking up. Until now, it hadn’t seemed so imminent.

Well, this couldn’t go on.

He pushed away from his seat, went around Ezri to where Julian Bashir was watching the band play.

“Julian? All right?”

“Oh, Miles … it’s good music, isn’t it? I think it was written in the fifties, though. It’s got that little swing about it—”

“I’m not talking about the song, mate.”

Bashir glanced at him. “No … I suppose not. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got my work cut out for me … we’re going to be helping to rebuild Cardassia, after all, and—”

O’Brien put a hand on his arm. “Julian, stop. No job is going to come between us. Not yours, and not even mine. Is that perfectly clear? You get leaves, I get leaves—there’s only so much that distance can do to keep us apart, and we’re in charge of that. This is the age of warp speed. Understand?”

Realizing perhaps for the first time that his looming loneliness wasn’t going to dominate their lives, Bashir met O’Brien’s gaze with a glint of genuine—not pretend—hope and gratitude.

“I understand,” he said.

O’Brien nodded. “You know the first thing I’m going to do when I get to Earth?”

“Take a trip to Texas.”

“And visit the Alamo.”

Bashir smiled. “You’ll send me a souvenir?”

Shaking his head, O’Brien did his best to look offended. “What do you think?”

A round of applause broke their conversation, and they realized the song was over. Thank God.

Captain Sisko’s glass was held high. O’Brien and Bashir turned to meet their commander’s toast.

“To the best crew any captain every had,” Sisko offered. When they had all lifted their glasses, he continued. “This may be our last night together, but I know one thing. No matter what the future may hold, no matter how far we travel or where we end up, a part of us, a very large part, will always remain here … on Deep Space Nine.”

Neither the most poetic nor the most profound speech ever made, but there wasn’t a one of them who didn’t believe every word. It was a promise between them, an extension of Bashir and O’Brien’s, that even those they would never see again would remain with them somehow.

O’Brien raised his glass to Sisko, then, before actually drinking, made sure that he and Bashir were looking at each other and had a private moment amid the public farewell.

Yes. It was time to move on—together.

* * *

“Are you sure you want to leave without saying goodbye?”

Kira Nerys walked beside Odo to the airlock, where the runabouts were stationed, fueled, and ready. Odo seemed pensive as he walked at her side, but he seemed also serene and in control. There wasn’t a bit of doubt in him.

“Quite sure,” he said. “I’m not very good at goodbyes.”

No, he wasn’t, she had to agree, and there was some sense to his refusal. If a goodbye was focused upon too much, then that would be all anyone would ever remember.

He was smart.

She beamed at him. “A lot of people are going to be disappointed.”

“If they don’t know how I feel about them now,” he pointed out quite rightly, “a few parting words won’t make any difference.”

At the threshold of the airlock, they had almost gone in together when a voice cracked at them from back in the corridor.

“I knew it!”

They turned—first mistake.

Quark was rushing toward them.

“When I saw the two of you slip out of the holosuite, I said to myself, ‘That no-good misanthropic cantankerous Changeling is trying to sneak off the station without anyone’s noticing!’”

Kira smiled.

“That was the idea,” Odo confirmed.

Quark rushed up to them and wheedled around between them and the airlock. “Well, it’s not going to happen!”

“Apparently not.”

“So now that I’m here, isn’t there something you want to say to me?”

Odo peered down at him. “Such as?”

“Such as, ‘Goodbye, you certainly were a worthy adversary,’ or maybe something with the words ‘mutual respect’ in it—”

“No.” Odo straightened sharply.

“No? What do you mean ‘no’”

“There’s nothing I want to say to you.”

Quark huffed, insulted. “You’re telling me that after all these years, after all we’ve been thorugh, you’re not even going to say goodbye to me?”

Clasping his hands behind his back, Odo raised his chin. “That’s right.”

Kira held her breath while the two men stared at each other for a long—and longer—time.

When that snapped, Odo looked at her. “Nerys, I’ll be on the runabout.”

With a final dismissive glare, he disappeared around Quark and into the airlock.

Quark shifted his weight a couple of times. “I guess that’s it, then.”

Kira nodded. “Don’t take it so hard, Quark.”

“Hard? What are you talking about? That man loves me! Couldn’t you see? It was written all over his—back!”

The Ferengi turned on a heel and wheeled down the corridor without turning even once to look this way again.

Of course! It wasn’t over! Kira smiled, then let herself actually laugh. Nothing was over, not at all. They were the kind of friends who could see each other every twenty years and it would be as if nothing had changed! Why hadn’t she realized that before?

And a lot could still happen, couldn’t it?

Sure it could. The future was big. She was looking forward to it.

* * *

The Fire Caves roared their full-fledged hellfire. Winn slowly regained control over her eyes, her arms. She looked and finally saw.

At the edge of the abyss, standing strong and straight, Dukat had been transformed back into a Cardassian—his born form, his birthright—and he seemed thrilled with himself.

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.”

They could look forever, Kasidy realized as he said that. They could actually do that—pass on the search to generations to come, to enhanced technologies, better science—and they still wouldn’t find him. He wasn’t anywhere that living corporeal beings could possibly look.

Why did she feel so light? As if she were floating.

“The Prophets warned us … they said we’d know nothing but sorrow….”

She leaned her head back against the rim of the couch. The people around her faded into the wall, the wall drifted into the corridor, the Promenade and its many levels dissipated, and she was gazing at clouds as white and fluffy as Earth’s beautiful northern mornings.

She blinked. Suddenly frightened, she felt her bearings falter. Her balance—was she standing? She hadn’t been.

Yes, she felt her feet, her legs.

“Hello?” she murmured. “Is anyone there?”

Her own heartbeat bumped reassuringly. One of them was alive, at least.

The wind blew gently, touching her ears, running like fingers in her hair, down her shoulders.

“Ben? Is that you?”

Was he calling to her?

His voice, deep and resonant, as if he were speaking inside a cave—

“Kasidy.”

“Ben!”

She turned, found him in the mist, and ran into his arms. Her husband!

He was solid, real. His arms—she felt the muscles, she felt them bend to hold her, warm and secure.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t death.

“Where are we?” she asked, as if the answer would make all this be real and right.

“At the entrance to the Celestial Temple.”

Oh … that told her too much.

She backed away. “The Celestial Temple … then I’m having a vision.”

“That’s right,” Ben told her. He wasn’t going to tell her any false wishes or treat her like a child. At least that.

“This is scaring me, Ben,” she attempted. “I want us to go back to Deep Space Nine.”

Worth a shot, wasn’t it?

Even as she said it, she knew the answer.

“I can’t,” he told her immediately, without frills.

It was the destiny he had been born for, the mysterious truth that had been masked by his human existence. How the cloudy beings who called themselves the Prophets would have a link to the living, breathing worlds they could only observe.

“Oh, my God,” Kasidy breathed.

“It’s difficult to explain. It isn’t linear…. My life, my destiny—the Prophets saved me so that I could be with them.”

“Be with them?” she repeated.

Ben took her arm, then her hand in both of his. “They have so much they want to teach me.”

She felt like she was frozen—she could barely force out the words. “How long will you be gone?”

“It’s difficult to say….” He hesitated. “Time doesn’t exist here.”

A terrible breath rattled through Kasidy’s body, proving to her that she was alive and really here, not imagining all this in a muddle of grief or fatigue. What was all that supposed to mean? Time doesn’t exist here?

What was he trying to say?

“Then this is the sorrow the Prophets warned us about?” she whispered.

She wanted him to say it.

He smiled. His dark eyes were soft beacons for her.

“Kas—I’ll be back.”

“When?” she persisted.

“It could be next year.” He smiled suddenly, with an understanding she didn’t share. “It could be yesterday. But I will be back.”

She heard the grim determination in his voice and knew he would find a way to make it true. “I’ll be waiting,” she promished.

She thought he took her in his arms once more, but now she was back on the couch, her arms tingling from his touch.

“Kas?”

That sounded like him.

No, the voice was … younger….

“Can you hear me? Kas?”

Jake bent over her, looking relieved as she blinked at him.

Everyone else was looking too. Worf, O’Brien, the doctor, Ezri—

She was back with them. Had she ever left?

“You seemed pretty far away for a second,” Julian Bashir said, bending over her.

“Not that far,” Kasidy told them. She looked at Jake, and for some reason she found herself smiling. An unworldly contentedness came over her. Like the wives of a million space captains and adventurers and great men of past times, she would find herself called upon to raise his children and be their guide alone, benchmarked by the high standard Ben Sisko had set for them.

She could do that. As she gazed at Jake, she saw in his youth the bright hope of the child within her, a new chance for the future, and somebody to be with.

“I was talking to your father,” she said.

They would wait for him.

CHAPTER

15

“Today’s duty roster, Colonel.”

Kira Nerys looked down from Deep Space Nine at the distant orb of Bajor, and noticed that it was morning over her home province. Everything was dawning. A whole new day, a new life.

She took the padd from Nog and scanned it. Everything was back in order. The day-to-day procedure of station activity was the best therapy she could imagine, not only for herself but for everybody here. The military had something, she decided, in its order and sense, in the strict utility of rank and process. Somehow it helped everybody to have duties, watches, purpose.

“Nice work,” she told the young Ferengi. “And congratulations on your promotion, Lieutenant.”

Nog seemed a little small and uneasy to be carrying such a big rank.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I guess putting me in for promotion was one of Captain Sisko’s last official acts.”

“I’m sure he’s very proud of you, Nog.”

“I’d like to think so, ma’am.”

Kira deliberately didn’t say “was.” She didn’t believe Sisko was dead. Nobody did.

Was he watching them? Now, there was a disturbing thought: no, he probably wasn’t acting as some kind of mystical voyeur. They were free to have privacy, and to make mistakes without a big daddy watching over them. He wouldn’t have wanted that for himself and she was betting he wasn’t eying them from the ethereal plane. He probably had his own duties out there, somewhere, teaching the Prophets a thing or two about life.

That made her smile.

But back to work. “Now, about the cargo inventories—”

Nog stepped back. “I’ll get right on it!”

He raced out of the room, delighted with his new job as station adjutant. A big job, a mighty station, very busy and getting busier as the sector stabilized. Starfleet was actually enjoying itself, and so was she. She too was proud of her own promotion—to station commander, carrying the authority of both the Bajoran military and Starfleet Command. It was a singular honor, and she was gratified by their faith in her.

They were showing faith in Sisko, too, she recognized, by giving her this post. He had trusted her, and that was good enough for Starfleet.

She appreciated their judgment. She could do the job.

—Well, not from here….

Ops. She suddenly wanted to be at the pulsing heart of the station, to spread her wings and really take over, to make sure they all knew that she was here to catch the ball.

The ball!

There it was—Captain Sisko’s little dutiful baseball, sitting on its stand where he had left it, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, “You can’t take it with you.”

She plucked the ball into her hand and tossed it in the air and caught it a couple of times. With that, the mantle had shifted fully to her. She’d never dared to touch it before.

He must approve … she thought he was smiling on his cloud someplace out there in a universe much bigger even than it seemed to be.

Managing to hold herself down from a run, she strode in amiable satisfaction to ops and plunged right in to the bleeping, humming center of activity that made Deep Space Nine a living place. In her hand the baseball was warm and solid. She rolled it in her fingers and scanned each post, taking solace in the steady information streaming from all over the quadrant to this single beacon in the darkness.

All around her at every station were new faces, young officers and trainees ready to tackle the next chapter in the conquest of the final frontier. Over there was the new chief of engineering. Beside him was the new tactical sergeant, and speaking to the new life sciences coordinator was the new chief constable of station security.

They nodded a polite greeting to their commander as they noticed her watching them. This was their time, and hers.

* * *

“What do you think?”

Julian Bashir had babbled away the morning after spending the whole evening transferring the Alamo from the O’Briens’ old quarters to his. And a bloody tight fit it was.

Despite a decidedly sour note to the move, the Alamo’s presence in his quarters somehow galvanized the idea that he was on his own for a while, without Miles.

Across the table from him in the replimat, Ezri was picking at her breakfast, with her mind obviously on something else. Her short dark hair reflected the overhead lights, separating them into the spectral colors green, blue, red, and yellow and making her eyes seem bright.

“What do you think of my new medical supply system?” he asked. “I’ve reworked the whole storage process.”

She blinked up at him. She hadn’t been listening. “I think maybe tonight, after dinner, we could go to Quark’s … maybe spend some time in the holosuites.”

Bashir thought about that. “I wouldn’t mind a little trip to Vegas.”

“Actually,” Ezri corrected, her eyes crinkling, “I was thinking about the Alamo.”

Sounded like a nice idea. Obviously she was trying to help him through this, working on adjusting the future to be as full as the past few years had been, even generously trying to replace the close friend who was no longer here with him.

But he shook his head. “We can’t go there.”

“Why not?”

He thought about coughing up some excuse, but the truth kept bubbling up and ultimately would do just as well. Probably because she already knew it.

“That was something Miles and I did.”

Would she understand? She was the repository of more than a dozen life forces, all those memories, relationships … she’d understand, more than most, wouldn’t she, that one person, no matter how loved, simply could not replace another?

“But,” he said, brightening, “we could try my new program. The Battle of Thermopylae.”

She gawked at him, her fork in midair. What? No human lifetimes lurking around in there?

Of course not. She hadn’t heard of that.

“You know,” he attempted, “where a small band of Spartans led by King Leonidas defended a mountain pass against the vast Persian army?”

“What happened?” she asked.

“For two days, the Spartans put up a heroic struggle.”

“Until they were wiped out.”

“How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. I take it we’ll be the Spartans?”

“Fighting to the last man!” Bashir proclaimed.

“Just like the Alamo?”

“Exactly!” He thumped the table.

Ezri put her fork down and sat back. “Julian, have you ever talked to a counselor about these annihilation fantasies you seem to have?”

Bashir blinked. Hadn’t thought of that one.

“You think I should?” he asked.

“I’ll set up a session for us tomorrow.”

Hmm … how very enticing. A doctor and a Trill getting together to discuss annihilation … oh, that was better left alone … but why was she leering that evil glare at him?

He leaned forward. “And tonight?”

She smiled broadly, her eyes crinkling with unshielded happiness and commitment.

“Tonight … we defend the pass!”

* * *

Commander Kira of Deep Space Nine strode the Promenade with a purpose and vectored into Quark’s bar, feeling somehow fulfilled at the mundane duty she was about to discharge.

Over there. Quark.

He was arguing with Morn. He had his back to her, so she strode up without announcing herself and listened to the last couple of blurts.

“That’ll be ten strips of latinum—I know, I know, I’ll put it on your tab. Don’t worry! It’s guaranteed to grow hair within a week! If you ask me, your dome’s hairy enough as it is. Besides, hasn’t there been enough change around here already?”

“Quark!” Kira swung around in front of him and wagged a padd in his face. “Do you mind explaining this?”

Quark’s knobby eyes flashed. “That’s this week’s betting pool.”

Kira huffed with insult. “You’re taking bets on who’s going to be Bajor’s new Kai?”

He spread his arms. “It’s a wide open field! Just between you and me, the smart money’s on Vedek Ungtae.”

Lowering the padd, she scowled at him. “Well, just between you and me, all bets are off.”

“What are you talking about!”

“As of this moment,” she said, “betting pools of any kind are illegal on this station.” Oh, that felt good! “I catch someone placing a bet, you’ll spend fifteen days in a holding cell. Is that clear?”

Quark looked shocked, then leered at her suspiciously. “Holding cells? Ah … let me think. Fifteen days … can I brink my own pillow?”

“Quark!”

“It’s clear, it’s clear.”

“It better be.”

Quark shook his head as he strode away. “It’s like I said. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Kira smiled. She let him go back to work. It felt good to do something so mundane and normal as chewing out Quark and telling he couldn’t do something. Anything. After a few days, she’d let him take bets again, but after the new Kai was appointed. Some things shouldn’t be matters of lot.

Strolling out onto the Promenade, Kira experienced an overwhelming sensation of peace and satisfaction. This alien station, once the very exemplar of despicable for her—a Cardassian outpost in claimed space—was now itself the embodiment of how things could change for the better. Despite its Cardassian design, this was a Starfleet station, a Bajoran holding, and a supreme victory for them all. They’d taken it, they’d lost it, they’d regained it, and now it was secure. The presence of Deep Space Nine secured the whole sector, indeed the quadrant. She believed now that it would never again fall.

She paused on the walkway overlooking the lower Promenade. Below, people freely roamed the shops, paused to talk, smiled, cried, comforted each other, and went on their ways. They all knew things were unconditionally different, but that somehow this was the brink from which they would all leap to the better.

There … that was where she and Odo had walked on their way to their last voyage together, where they had linked arms in a way that his native people could never imagine or know how to enjoy.

Over there, on the second level, Worf and Ezri strode together with Chancellor Martok, on the path to the docking pylon where the Klingon ships were serviced. Martok was doing all the talking. Worf and Ezri were looking at each other in silence. Worf carried his duffel bag. His bat’leth was slung over his shoulder. Kira imagined what Martok was saying—enthusiasms about the future of the Klingon Empire … great hunts and good songs … but Worf wasn’t listening. He turned instead, gazed at Ezri as he never had before, and all of them, even Kira way up here watching, began thinking about Jadzia.

Somberly, Worf removed his bat’leth from his shoulder and handed it to Ezri. A parting gift—to her who knew what it was to be his wife.

Kira shivered with emotion, and had to look away.

As her eyes scanned the vast sweeping walkways of the station, they fell upon another quest for the future—Chief O’Brien shooing his family down the ramp toward Airlock Four. His own bags were slung on his shoulder, together with several more bags that must belong to his children. Before him ran Molly, while Keiko carried the baby and nipped orders at two yeomen who were carrying still more bags and boxes.

Kira watched the little face of Kirayoshi and tried not to remember what she had promised herself she could forget—the undying tie between herself and the O’Briens. That was a family she had helped build. She had to force herself not to call out to them before Keiko and the children disappeared under the walkway she was standing on. Now there was only O’Brien, shuffling along with all his burden—

Oh, there was Bashir, catching up to him, taking a couple of the bags from him. Then the doctor caught O’Brien by the elbow and stopped him.

They were too far down there for Kira to hear what they were saying—not much, judging by what she saw. In fact, they seemed to be having trouble speaking at all to each other.

She understood. After years here together, what words could be enough? She thought of Odo.

Bashir was making O’Brien put his bags down for a moment. Kira squinted as the doctor put something into O’Brien’s hand. What was that? A good luck charm?

Then she recognized it … it was one of those little figurines from the Alamo model they’d worked on together. O’Brien had showed it to her proudly—little Colonel Travis, the brave commander of the losing side.

O’Brien smiled and his cheeks reddened. He didn’t know what to say, so he was saying nothing. Shoring up his resolve, he nodded, and extended a hand to shake. Bashir put out his own hand and clasped O’Brien’s. See ya.

Kira shook her head and smiled at them scoldingly, but before she could shout an interruption that would embarrass them both, they had done her job—they were locked in a bear hug.

Much better.

She settled back and turned away to the other side of the walkway, letting them have their last moments in privacy.

There were other people to watch, people who were staying on Deep Space Nine. Putting one hand on the rail, she gazed downward custodially at the customers coming and going from Quark’s and the other shops below. They were hers to protect now, hers to understand. She would help them if she could.

As she scanned the Promenade viewports, windows that showed the open panorama of space, she saw something that did disturb her—one of the people here she probably couldn’t help.

On the second level, Jake Sisko stood at the viewport, staring out into open space where the wormhole lurked in its other dimension. The boy stared out into it.

A man looked back, but it was his own reflection in the viewport permaglass.

Kira moved quietly to stand beside him. Together they watched as the wormhole magically burst open, its giant drain swirling and rushing, and a messenger ship from this side effortlessly slid inside.

The first of many. A whole new realm of possibility.

They stood together, thinking the same thoughts, two small beings on a great station—only a dot of light on the ceiling of the space cathedral, but a star of hope for all who looked.

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ISBN: 0-671 03476-6

ISBN 13: 978-0-7434-2085-3 (ebook)

First Pocket Books printing June 1999

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