Mello complied.
“Xiang,” Kira said. “Do it.”
The doctor cautiously approached the captain, phaser ready. She stepped around Mello and lifted the captain’s long brown curls, searching. Finally she said, “It’s not here.”
Kira went cold. “Look again.”
Xiang did, and shook her head. “I’m telling you, she’s clean. I… Alex, what are you—?”
Kira spun around, seeing Montenegro smiling at her from the corridor an instant before the doors snapped closed.
Prophets, no!
She ran to the door. A force field knocked her back. It was him all along—!
There was the sound of someone hitting the deck behind her—
Kira spun around again, phaser up, and froze. Xiang was unconscious on the floor, and Mello was holding the doctor’s phaser. She and Kira stood there at arm’s length from each other, each one holding her weapon inches from the other’s eye.
Montenegro smiled as he ran down the corridor, tapping his combadge. “Computer: initiate program Montenegro One, thirty-second delay.”
There was a chime of acknowledgment. “Program will initiate in thirty seconds,” the computer said as Montenegro entered a turbolift.
“Bridge,” he said. He was still smiling as the lift ascended.
18
With a profound feeling of déjà vu, Nog followed Bowers through the forest to the mock campsite they had set up before. They had beamed down at the site of the Borg wreckage with Gordimer, Shar, and T’rb. It was the task of the latter three to enter the ship and retrieve one of the Borg corpses. Commander Tenmei’s neuroprocessor—the device every drone possessed that contained its specific instructions from the collective—had been destroyed when she was damaged. Shar and his team would need to beam up a dead drone and extract another neuroprocessor in order to find out the exact circumstances surrounding the Valkyrie’s mission to the Gamma Quadrant.
Bowers and Nog, meanwhile, had a decidedly different job: convincing the changeling to return with them.
“So, what do you think our chance of success is?” Nog asked Bowers. “Two percent? One?”
“I’m not worried about not succeeding,” Bowers said, adjusting his tricorder. “I’m worried about what happens if we do. A Founder on the Defiant,that’s something to keep the security staff up at night. I heard about the one who almost took control of the old Defiantbefore the war.”
“It did take control,” Nog corrected absently as he double-checked his own equipment. He hadn’t been with Starfleet then, but he’d heard the story enough times from Chief O’Brien. “Captain Sisko almost had to destroy the ship.”
“Great,” said Bowers.
“But most of what it accomplished, it could do because people didn’t know at first that it was there. Ezri says we’re just going to return this one to the Dominion, since we’re not at war anymore. I don’t think it’ll have any reason to try and harm us.”
“Does it need a reason?”
Nog shrugged. “They don’t think they’re a lot like us, but I don’t know. They do think about their actions. Not like the Borg.” He and Bowers exchanged another look. Nog was pretty sure having a Borg drone on board would keep security up at night, too. It might keep himup.
“We’d better get a move on. Ready?”
“If that changeling is halfway across the planet by now, we’re sunk.”
“I don’t think it is,” said Bowers. “There’s nothing here to interest it. When we showed up it was just waiting in that wreck. It’s ready to leave.”
Probably since the day it got here,Nog thought.
“After two years it’s got to know the Dominion doesn’t know it’s here,” Bowers went on. “We’re its only way out. It may be scared, but it may also want to find us again even more than we want to find it.”
The nonessential equipment they had left behind did not appear to have been disturbed, and Nog packed it up regretfully. He hoped Bowers was right about the Founder sticking around, but he was afraid Bowers was wrong.
They were headed farther north when Bowers gestured frantically for quiet and Nog froze, then glanced down at his tricorder. Just on the edge of their sensor range was the Dominion ship. And inside, again, were the faint humanoid readings they had picked up when the first arrived.
Bowers had doubled back to where Nog stood and now hissed in his ear, “We’re going in, and this time, no noise!”
Nog nodded to show he understood.
They approached the ship from the south, under the engine pylon. Although Nog was now familiar with the interior of the ship, the act of returning felt even more surreal. The smell of decay and moss still pervaded the air, and Nog tried not to wrinkle his nose. His feet sloshed as he moved toward the source of the humanoid readings: the bridge. Try as he might, he had a difficult time picturing the Founder sitting calmly within the wreckage, surrounded by attending corpses.
Then he turned the corner and she was there, waiting, sitting on her haunches in a puddle of brackish water. She looked up at them, calmly, her face blank of expression. “I thought you left,” she said, in a voice that sounded as young as she looked. She seemed completely unaffected by the Jem’Hadar skeletons less than four meters away.
“No, we didn’t leave,” Bowers said. “We returned to our ship. But our vessel is still in orbit.”
Her face didn’t change. “Why?”
“We wanted to find you,” Nog said, finding his voice. She turned her attention to him but didn’t say anything. “To apologize,” he improvised. “We didn’t mean to hurt you before.” Ezri had been less than thrilled to discover they had hit the Founder with a phaser blast.
She regarded him carefully. “It didn’t hurt,” she said. “It surprised me. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Yes,” he said. “Another Founder showed us how to do it.”
At that the girl did react—she looked angry. “No Founder would show you how to do that,” she said. “You’re lying.”
Bowers was shooting him a warning glare, Don’t make her mad,but Nog had figured from the beginning that the only way to close the deal was to put Odo on the table. “Maybe not a Founder who grew up with you,” he said shrewdly. “But what about one of the Hundred who were sent out to live among solids? That’s who our friend Odo was.”
Now she looked suspicious as well as angry. “I know about Odo,” she said. “He rejected the link. He caused the death of another Founder. He was cast out.”
“No,” corrected Nog. “He went back to the link, after the Federation and the Dominion made peace.”
“There is no peace between the Federation and the Dominion,” she said.
“There is,” Bowers interrupted. “We even have a Jem’Hadar living among us in the Alpha Quadrant. He was sent to us by Odo.”
She considered this. “I understand that kind of peace,” she said. “You have Vorta, also, overseeing you, and many Jem’Hadar.”
“No—” Bowers started to say, but Nog quickly interrupted.
“I don’t understand what a Jem’Hadar is doing there myself, actually. If you come back with us, I’m sure Taran’atar will tell you all about it. You could even order him to accompany you home,” he added, ignoring Bowers’s incredulous stare. I win, everybody wins.Looked at in the right light, it was even, finally, putting one over on Constable Odo.
“Taran’atar. This is your First?” she asked.
“He’s First aboard our station,” Nog said.