10
60,062 (Kurillian calendar)
The Council was divided.
And it wasn't just divided two ways. Depending on who one spoke with, there were three, four, or as many as five factions, all of them fighting with each other. Those who wanted to join the Dominion—Weyoun among them, wanted to do so quickly. Others were urging caution and circumspection, and then there were those who wanted no part of the Dominion—the ones that Weyoun didn't understand and doubted he ever would.
There was another issue that had begun plaguing Weyoun. Since the Founder had arrived, support for the space program, which had been high for years, plummeted. Suddenly no one was interested, particularly not in funding it. Weyoun couldn't entirely blame them. Part of the agreement the Vorta were being offered to join the Dominion was shared spaceflight technology, and as the Jem'Hadar were clearly far more advanced in that arena than the Vorta would be for years, possibly centuries, there didn't seem to be any point to most people to continue funding Kurill Prime's homegrown efforts to explore space. There was money to send the first extraplanetary orbital up. After that—the program's survival looked tenuous at best.
Weyoun knew there was a place for a Kurillian space program. The problem was convincing everyone else that he was right, and in such a way that his support for joining the Dominion wasn't questioned. As though those two issues weren't enough, his reelection was approaching—Leto had already begun on the preliminary paperwork, and the two of them had been studying local polling to try to determine how he'd run his campaign. With all of that, he found himself spending long days and evenings in his offices, wishing he was at home with Eris but knowing that he owed it to his world to campaign his hardest for the Vorta to join the Dominion.
On one of the rare nights that he did go home at a reasonable time, he insisted on bringing takeaway in, and he and Eris had a meal together for once, rather than him grabbing a tray of the slop that the canteen was serving these days and her cooking for herself. After dinner, they sat on the sectional in the living room, both of them occupied by their respective work, in a way that they hadn't done for what felt like ages.
Though he knew he had plenty to do, Weyoun found himself staring blankly at the windows, mulling over in his mind the debate that had gone on during the session earlier in the day—the debate that now went on every day, and seemed to go nowhere. The sequestrists, always his adversaries, had mostly taken an anti-Dominion stance. This included, of course, Soltoi. Looking back, he supposed he should have seen it coming in her tone of voice the day before the plenary session where the Founder had made her offer.
Idly, Weyoun asked, "What do you think we should do?" He realized, as the words left his mouth, that not once had he bothered to pose this simple question to his wife.
She glanced up at him from her padd, her eyebrows raised. "I was beginning to think that you assumed you knew what I thought."
Weyoun shifted to put an apologetic arm around her. "That's exactly what I assumed."
"I'm always charmed by your rare shows of honesty." Eris put a hand on her stomach absently. The curve of her pregnancy was beginning to show, and that made him feel guilty. He'd been far too caught up in his work of late—he needed to regain balance. A vacation would be nice, but he couldn't even imagine taking time off for it, not with his reelection approaching, and the bigger issue of every planetary governmental body being embroiled in the issue of whether or not to join the Dominion. That long-ago trip to Loravin seemed like paradise—and like someone else's life.
"I'm always honest with you," he said, mildly hurt. "If I wasn't," he added, "I might lose my grip on what's true and what's just expedient."
"Hm. I very much doubt that." Putting aside her lecture notes, she said, "But since you ask, I think we should join the Dominion."
"At least we're in agreement," he said darkly.
She shifted slightly, curling her legs up underneath her and turning to face him. As she settled into the new position, a startled look flashed across her face and she put her hand back to her stomach. "Do you hear that?" she asked.
Weyoun cocked his head. There were many things that a Vorta heard, and ignored, every minute of every day. As of that moment he could hear a myriad of small, easily minimized sounds—rain and hail, mostly, the metro passing every thirteen minutes, the hum of the cooler in the kitchen, water dripping in the sonic shower that no one had gotten around to fixing. Eris's heartbeat, since he was close enough to her. And then, suddenly, he heard what he knew she was referring to—another faint thudding keeping time with her pulse but distinct from it. The baby, shifted into a position that brought its heart closer to the wall of Eris's womb.
Giving her just as startled of a look as she'd had on her face, Weyoun said, "Is that…?" Eris's hand was still on her abdomen, and without looking at him, she nodded. He thought she was biting her lip. He slid closer to her. "I never heard a heartbeat with the first one."
"No. The first fetus didn't have a strong heart. Not uncommon with a first pregnancy." She looked up at him, a radiance to her smile that made him want, once more, to retreat from his responsibilities just to be with her. "This is a good sign." Then, her smile turning slightly mischievous, she added, "Try to remember that while you're bashing your head against a duraplastic wall during the Council session tomorrow."
"I'll try," he said with a chuckle.
The moment turned out to have been a quiet eddy in his life; one that he did come back to, trying to hold onto when the Council or various lobbies irritated him. One problem, in particular, was rising to the forefront—Soltoi was becoming a powerful force in the Council's anti-Dominion faction; so powerful that even senators persuadable to another viewpoint were currently siding with her. They were doing it quietly, of course, but between him and his staff, he knew who they were, knew their reasons, and had failed to sway any of them to his side.
"Soltoi's still senior senator," one of Vleta Exarchate's senators had told him with an almost apologetic shrug. "And she will be for a long time. Who wants to be on her bad side?"
No one, Weyoun knew, being there himself. He sometimes wondered if his vociferous support for joining the Dominion had something to do with Soltoi's impassioned stance against it—but that was churlish. His former employer hated him, undoubtedly, and while she allowed grudges to guide some of her choices in the politics (who didn't?), this one was too important be personal about.
In any case, talking to the people she had convinced wasn't doing him any good—the next step, the only step, was to talk to Soltoi herself and try to convince her to moderate her stance or change it outright. The possibility seemed remote, but he had to try. The prospect didn't thrill him. Every day he re-wrote a new speech in his head to deliver to her, and every day he knew it wouldn't work. He took to wandering the skyways, hoping that a change of scenery would help him decide what to say to soften Soltoi's position.
One day, without quite realizing where he was going, he found himself in front of the Tir shrine, staring at its open and inviting archway. For a long moment, he hesitated outside, but then, making up his mind, he ducked in. He could use a little guidance right now. There was a certain irony to the fact that his gods were so close, yet they weren't providing it themselves.
The darkness inside the shrine was comforting in its familiarity, the flickering candlelight lending everything a soft, rutilant blur. Weyoun stood in the entryway for a moment, looking around at the house of worship that had been his when he'd still lived in the city center. Each shrine was built in the same shape, a round room with the altar opposite the door, and doors on either side of the altar that led to the clerics' rooms in the back. This one was no different. The differences in each shrine lay in the details; in the size, of course—the more important the shrine, the larger it was—and in the materials that made it up. As testimony to the mutable quality of the Founders, each shrine was outfitted slightly differently, usually with materials and objects from the district that it served. One section of the wall of this one was covered entirely in Council holo-discs, while the walls themselves, as well as the floor, were made from the wood of the tela, a deciduous tree that Tira Exarchate was famed for.
Despite what he'd told the Founder when he'd spoken to her, he wasn't sure that his worship had been…sufficient. When he'd still been coming to this city center shrine, he'd felt generally more devout, more…connected to his faith. He thought it might have something to do with the shrine itself, though he wasn't naïve enough to blame it entirely on Athoun's preference for grandeur over devotion. He'd had other things on his mind for years, and though he had never stopped faithfully attending services, his attention had wandered often. He doubted he was alone. Now, of course, his attendance at services had gone over a precipice. The Founder didn't seem to care about prayers and shrines or the Vorta vision of worship. She hadn't, to his knowledge, even visited a shrine—though admittedly, he didn't consider himself any sort of insider, despite his conversation with her. But news traveled fast on Kurill Prime and that sort of thing would have been trumpeted by the lucky shrine that received a visit.
In this—his lack of attendance at services—he doubted he was alone, either.
He was so caught up in his study of the room, and his own thoughts, that he didn't even notice the entry of the priest. It was the whisper of her robes that caught his attention, and not the creak of the door as it opened, and when he turned his head towards her, she smiled. "Senator," she greeted, inclining her head as she went to the altar. "It's good to see you here again. I thought you'd left the Tir district."
"I have," he said, trying to remember her name. He'd never had a close relationship with any of the clerics at the Tir shrine, but he recognized her, had spoken to her on occasion. Suddenly, it came to him. "Luaran, isn't it?" he asked, and she nodded. He shifted his gaze to the thick candles on the altar. It was the same as he remembered it, and yet different, the wax trails that coated it making it an ever-changing thing. Simpler, by far, than the Athoun shrine. "I've missed this place," he said idly.
"I'm certain your district's shrine is far more splendid than this one," she said, a twitch of dryness at the corner of her mouth.
It was true, of course. The Athoun district was home to too many exarchate luminaries to have a simple shrine. Returning the almost-smile on her face with a wry one of his own, he said, "Maybe. I've found, over the years, that I prefer this one."
Her answer was her dry smile as she went to the altar and began tending to the candles, a thrice-daily devotion for the clerics at each shrine. Weyoun had seen it many times, but it was still hypnotic, the practiced way that Luaran picked up each candle, swirling the melted wax around inside the cupola, and poured it across the altar. Some of the melted wax would drip down the sides and legs, some would spread across the surface of the altar, and some would become part of the candles again. Mutable. Changing. Like the Founders themselves.
Now, seeing her perform the ritual, he couldn't help thinking that it was nothing like the Founders themselves. Perhaps that was what was so comforting about it. In their religion that espoused fluidity and transformation, it turned out that Weyoun had still been comforted by its constructed mutability. The Founders themselves were outside the proscribed boundaries of Vorta faith and Weyoun missed the…simplicity of what that faith had been before.
Now, no one was quite sure how to worship, if the emptiness of the shrine was any indication. He remembered what the shrines had been like right after the first contact and doubted that any of them had seen that kind of attendance since. The Founders seemed to value order, not mutability—at least for the Jem'Hadar and, now, the Vorta.
"Is it like this all the time?" Weyoun asked as Luaran finished the ritual.
There was a sadness in her eyes, and a resignation, as she replied, "Yes. It seems that no one has all that much need of us now."
For a long moment, he stared at her. He'd come here with some vague notion of receiving guidance, but now it seemed clear that he couldn't possibly find it here. These shrines were quaint and outmoded now—comforting, yes, but ultimately throwbacks to a bygone era. "I hope—" he began, but then stopped himself. What had he meant to say? He hoped Vorta began returning to the shrines? He wasn't that naïve, and he doubted she was either.
A faint, melancholy smile flickered across her face, as though she knew what he'd been about to say and why he'd stopped. "Was there something I could help you with, Senator?" she asked him gently.
Weyoun looked around. He'd spent so much of his young adulthood here, but he knew that he'd never come back after today. "No," he replied. "Thank you, Luaran. I was just passing by."
She inclined her head and, her robes whispering, disappeared back through the door behind the altar. For another few minutes, Weyoun stared at the guttering candles, and then he turned and left the solitude and quiet of the shrine.
He didn't bother making an appointment to see Soltoi. Had he tried, he suspected she would have found that she was busy, over and over again. Since he'd resigned from her staff eight years ago, he hadn't seen a need to meet privately with her. Certainly they both attended the same meetings and official functions, and they sat in the same section during Council sessions, but they never worked together on legislation, and Weyoun couldn't fathom ever working with her. It wasn't that there was such a divide between them politically—they agreed on certain issues—but their personal enmity was insurmountable.
Unfortunately, they currently disagreed on the biggest issue facing the Council, and Weyoun finally forced himself to descend to her offices one day, talking his way past Soltoi's personal assistant and into a meeting with her. It felt, as it had when he'd been a young man, more like an audience.
Weyoun didn't mince words; he figured that he had no more than ten minutes, anyway, before she started making threats to force him to leave. Soltoi didn't offer him a seat and he didn't take one, instead standing in front of her desk and saying, "I'm well aware of the bad blood between us, Senator. But without your support the Council will never vote to join the Dominion, and that is unacceptable."
Soltoi stared at him coldly. "I'm counting on precisely that fact, Senator," she replied, his title dripping with venom. "The Founders may be our gods. They are not our political masters, and I won't vote on something that strips us of our sovereignty."
He straightened and stared at her. It was a more impassioned, and more personal, piece of reasoning than he'd expected to hear. "We'd be more powerful than we could ever hope to be on our own," he said.
With a thin, mirthless smile, Soltoi replied, "Perhaps. We'd also be servants."
"We've always been the Founders' servants, anyway."
At this, Soltoi actually laughed. "This is a side of you that I wasn't aware of when you worked for me. I never would have guessed that you harbored that kind of blind, stupid faith—but I suppose, having come from the slums, that was all you had?" He ignored the jab, and saw that she had expected nothing less of him. "I am, of course, a servant of the Founders, in a strictly religious sense. But this is not a theocracy, they are not our political leaders, and I refuse to hand power over to them."
Weyoun crossed his arms over his chest. "You've actually surprised me. I would have thought you'd leap to be running the Dominion."
"I'm glad," she said, sounding vitriolically quite the opposite, "that I can surprise you after so many years of professional proximity." She paused, staring at him, and the animosity in her eyes seemed to waver slightly for a second. "I hope despite the 'bad blood between us', as you put it, you'll consider voting against the motion to join the Dominion."
"You're trying to change my mind?" Weyoun laughed.
Her expression didn't alter. "The document that details the benefits to our world was vague at best. Technology sharing? We have a space program, thanks to your noble efforts, and I suspect our biotechnology surpasses their own. That is, after all, the ostensible reason that we're being offered a place in the Dominion at all. And then there's their offer to provide 'protection'. Protection from what? It's the Jem'Hadar that have brought guns to Kurill."
Weyoun raised an eyebrow, thinking, but not saying out loud, that if they didn't join the Dominion, they might very well need protection from the Jem'Hadar. He wasn't naïve, and the conversation he'd had with the Founder a month ago had never been far from his mind. There were 'enemies of the Dominion' out there—he had to assume that at least one or two of them were races who had refused to join the Founders. "You're forgetting the one really important thing. We're going to have an important place in the Dominion."
"And I'm sure you're shocked that I could turn down the offer of that kind of power." When Weyoun cocked his head and smiled slightly, confirming her statement, Soltoi blew a derisive breath of air out through her nose. "There are," she said, as though to herself, "more important things."
A pregnant silence held her office for a moment, but then, finally, Weyoun replied, "You taught me otherwise."
The two senators held each other's gazes for a minute, and then Soltoi finally said, with a remarkable lack of her usual bite, "The answer is no. I won't vote for the measure, and I won't encourage anyone else to vote for it."
"You could stop actively undermining my efforts—"
"No," she said again. "I cannot."
Weyoun's innate stillness held him as he considered his dilemma. There was nothing he could offer Soltoi. She didn't want to work with him; his support would mean nothing to her. She was one of the longest serving senators in the Council, after all. It was him standing here asking her for a favor, and he had quite clearly been rebuffed. Something else would be needed to convince her to vote for admission into the Dominion. All that he had to do was find what that something else was. The answer wasn't here.
Bowing his head stiffly, Weyoun said, "Thank you for your time, Senator."
"I don't think you have anything to thank me for. But the fact that you still have manners is encouraging."
He held her gaze without blinking for another moment, then turned around and left her office. Something else, then. He'd find something that would force Soltoi to see things his way.
Whatever that something was, it eluded Weyoun for the next several weeks. He had other things on his mind, namely the fast approaching launch of the first extraplanetary orbital. The date had snuck up on him, which he regretted—he'd spent so much of his political career building a space program on Kurill Prime, and now that it was reaching a seminal moment, he'd barely been paying attention, spending all his attention on the Dominion and making sure that the space program continued to get funding. The launch itself was just one more thing that he'd lost sight of.
Despite the fact that he really didn't have any, he found the time to eat breakfast with Deimos the morning before the launch. As the Spaceflight Committee had a session that day, they met in the Complex canteen, just as they had every morning before Deimos had gone to Ground Control. The food, as always, was of questionable quality, but it had always been the company, anyway, that had made the breakfast worthwhile.
"Will you be at the launch tomorrow?" Deimos asked as they ate.
Weyoun glanced up at him from his breakfast and was struck powerfully, for a moment, by how much they had changed. Those first few years of university they'd spent almost as much time in holo-arcades as they had studying, but both of them had found purpose and a path eventually. But some things never changed: Deimos had never lost his characteristic irreverence, and Weyoun had never lost his seriousness. Both of them of remained ambitious, and it had gotten them to where they were; one of them an astronaut, heading up the entire spaceflight division at Ground Control, and the other a senator, his political prospects ranged in front of him.
"I'm sorry, Deimos, but I'm too busy," Weyoun replied. "There's a vote in two days on whether or not to continue debate. I need to make sure that the Council does."
"Ah, that's right. You don't think the Council would vote to join if it were held in two days?" When Weyoun shook his head, Deimos added, "Well, I expect I'll get back from the mission and find that Kurill Prime is readying itself to become part of the Dominion."
"You'll be gone for five months," Weyoun pointed out.
"I've found that one should never underestimate how slowly government can move."
"I wish I shared your confidence."
"I think you do, deep down." Deimos picked at his food. He was in that state of pre-mission excitement where he wouldn't eat, which would give way, once he'd realized the type of food he'd be confined to for the duration of his time in space, to a voracious appetite. "I'd say I'll miss you being there, but I won't be there myself."
"I'll send Leto. She'll probably be a better representative for me than I could be for myself."
"Not that that would be anything out of the ordinary."
"Your wit is, as ever, Deimos, keen."
Deimos grinned at him. "I'll take that as a compliment from you."
Weyoun sliced what was, supposedly, a curried egg in half. "Tell me your route again? I seem to have developed a short-term memory problem where this mission is concerned."
"I wish the entire Council would develop a memory problem where all of Ground Control is concerned and just let us go about our business in peace," Deimos snorted. "But to jog your memory: once my orbital slingshots around Vrilla, I'll be one week in transit and refueling on Pagos—sorry, Kurill Two—before I continue on past Kurill Three and Four to the gas giants. The trip out past Kurill Six should take about two months, and I'll probably stop and do some research on Kurill Six's moons, since they seem to have a far richer supply of duridium than Kurill Two has. And then it's out to the scattered disc, the real wilds of our solar system. No one really knows what's out there, and I'm going to be the first to find out."
Weyoun looked at him thoughtfully. "The Jem'Hadar probably know what's out there."
With a dismissive wave of his hand, Deimos replied, "And I'm not asking them. This is something Vorta need to find out for themselves."
"I couldn't agree more." The curried egg was a disgrace to its name and Weyoun drank his kava instead. "We'll have to name a street after you for this grand journey."
"I was thinking more along the lines of spaceport," Deimos said. "But either way, you should probably get started on the legislation arranging it immediately."
"Oh, undoubtedly." The two old friends smiled at each other, and then, realizing they were both finished with their breakfasts and that the time for Deimos's committee session was approaching, Weyoun said, "I suppose I'll see you in five months, then."
"I'll come back with something so spectacular that nobody will want to cancel the space program," Deimos promised. "Maybe a wormhole to some distant part of the galaxy."
"You know, knowing you, I wouldn't be surprised if you did."
The two of them looked at each other for a moment, and then Weyoun got to his feet. Deimos did the same, saying, "Good luck to you on your Council battles."
With a slight smile, Weyoun replied, "Good luck to you, boldly going where no Vorta has gone before."
Deimos grinned and clapped Weyoun on the shoulder. "That has a nice ring to it." He paused, then said, "Give Eris my best, of course." With a wicked grin, he added, "She's going to be enormous by the time I get back, isn't she?"
"We hope so," Weyoun replied, "though I'm sure she could do without the enormous part."
Chuckling, Deimos said, "I'm sure." He hesitated, a serious look coming over his face. "Weyoun—I hope you and Eris know—I really am very happy for both of you. All joking aside, you're going to be amazing parents. I'm sure of it."
For a second, Weyoun didn't know what to say, so when he did reply, it was with a simple, "Thank you."
Giving Weyoun a lopsided smile, his friend clapped him on the shoulder again, and then was gone.
The launch came and went; Weyoun only remembered it by the time Deimos's ship had almost certainly left the atmosphere and was getting ready to use Vrilla's orbit to slingshot himself into his five month sojourn in the uncharted depths of the Kurill system. He looked out the window, but of course rain was pouring down. Had it been the dry season, he would have been able to see the long plume of exhaust hanging above the city. The monsoon hid it from view and probably washed it from the sky, besides.
For a long moment, Weyoun stared out the window anyway. A tiny part of him was jealous of Deimos—but that was just one more reason to make sure the Vorta joined the Dominion. The Jem'Hadar starships were large and almost certainly spacious inside. There would be no cramming oneself into a tiny cabin if Vorta were welcome on one of those ships. And maybe, if Weyoun angled himself into the right position, he'd see space one day, as well—see his planet from the void; possibly other planets as well, if the ships were as fast as they had to be to travel between the stars.
Weyoun shook himself and looked back to the padd he'd been holding for the past quarter of an hour. It contained the motion that the Council would be voting on the following day, and he'd been contacting and cajoling friends, enemies, and everyone in between in the Council, trying to convince them that a continued debate vote was the best way to proceed. He felt restless and ineffectual, and when Leto came into his office halfway through the morning, she took one look at him and suggested he go see Foros.
"You need a break," she said. "And some advice."
He ended up in Foros's office, talking not about professional matters but about their lives; about Foros's brother's newest hymn cycle and his niece. Weyoun sometimes envied Foros's relationship with his sibling, and sometimes he thought that a rapprochement of some sort might be viable between him and his own estranged family—but as quickly as that thought came, it was dismissed. The time for that was long past—if Weyoun had wanted it, the time had been ten years ago. Not that the lack of relationship kept his siblings from taking the money that he still faithfully sent. Though, he thought idly, perhaps it wasn't reaching his siblings at all and someone had simply appropriated their identities. ID forgery was a major business in the slums.
The conversation did, inevitably, turn to things more professional, as Weyoun eventually said, "I could use your advice on dealing with Soltoi's obstinacy. I've been to see her and she categorically refuses to stop standing in the way of Kurill Prime joining the Dominion."
Smiling slightly, Foros replied, "Oh, I'm not sure you do. You'll come up with some way to sway her to your way of thinking. Or, barring that, a way to make her opinion irrelevant."
Weyoun raised an eyebrow. "I suspect it will come to the latter."
"You may be right. Soltoi does hold a grudge better than anyone I've ever met."
"I wish she'd loosen her death grip on her grudge just enough to see that her obstruction of Dominion membership is detrimental to this entire planet."
At these words, Foros stared at him thoughtfully for a long moment. Then, he said carefully, "I suppose she doesn't see it that way."
With a scoff, Weyoun said, "Of course she doesn't see it that way, she—" Then, he stopped. Something about the way Foros had said that had been odd; something in his tone made Weyoun think that the other man's comment had been less about Soltoi and more about himself. Narrowing his eyes at his mentor, Weyoun said slowly, "You say that as though you understand how she feels."
"Perhaps I do," Foros said quietly.
For a long moment, Weyoun watched him. Then, he said, "You don't think we should join the Dominion."
He'd hoped he was wrong, but when Foros sighed, he knew he wasn't. "No. No, I don't."
Weyoun stared hard at him. "Why?"
The other man looked weary for the first time that Weyoun could remember. "Don't you find some of the rhetoric troubling? This business about…a chaotic world, and helping the Founders to impose order. I don't like it."
"They're gods, Foros," Weyoun said disbelievingly. "That's what gods do. They…make the world in their image, they create order out of chaos—" He cut himself off when Foros's expression only darkened. "You thought I was accusing you of blasphemy once," he said slowly. "I could do it now and it would be true."
"And are you going to, Weyoun?" Foros asked wearily. "Are you going to tell the Jem'Hadar that there's a senator who isn't devoted enough? Or rather, who isn't devoted in the right way." He laughed mirthlessly. "You know, I've been told more than once, over my life, that my worship of the Founders is liberal and naïve. I always smiled to myself and thought, how ironic that these people insist on one form of worship for the Founders, for gods that can change their shape whenever they want to. And I knew that my tolerance of the infinite diversity of faith was right." He paused, a mirthless smile still on his face. "Looks like the joke's on me, doesn't it?"
Weyoun kept staring at him, but finally he looked away. "It's not for me to say if you're proving your faith the right or wrong way," he said stiffly. "I regret implying that your worship is…deficient."
This time, Foros laughed slightly more genuinely. "Oh, but it is, Weyoun. I'm not sure there's a place for me on Kurill Prime. I knew where I stood on Kurill and I knew what my constituents needed—at least I hope I knew; I always tried to know. But now…"
"You sound like you're planning on resigning from the Council," Weyoun scoffed. Then, when Foros didn't answer, he looked at his mentor sharply, saying with dawning realization, "You are, aren't you?"
"The thought has been crossing my mind with more and more frequency," Foros said. "I'll stay to vote against admission into the Dominion. But if that motion passes, and I'm sure it will, then I'm not sure I can stay."
Crossing his arms over his chest, Weyoun said, "I wouldn't be so sure that it will pass. Not with Soltoi against it."
At that, Foros really did chuckle. "Who would have ever thought that Soltoi and I would agree on something?"
With a wan smile, Weyoun replied, "That may be the most shocking thing in all of this."
The two of them stood in silence for a moment, and then Foros put a hand on Weyoun's shoulder. "You have to do what you think is right. I knew the first time I met you, back when you were just Soltoi's newly-promoted senior aide, that you were going to go places most of us can only dream about. Whatever happens, Weyoun, it's been an honor to serve on the Council with you."
Weyoun swallowed, feeling an absurd tightening in his chest. Tomorrow they'd be out on the chamber floor debating each other again and nothing would be different. Except it would be. Foros didn't say things he didn't mean, not to friends, and Weyoun was lucky—extremely lucky—to count himself one of those. "Likewise," he said, inclining his head, unable to say anything else.
Foros looked sad. "In our business, we have to trust our instincts. I'm not sure how good mine are, but they're telling me one thing—the Dominion is dangerous."
"I don't disagree with you," Weyoun said. Then, with a nod to his friend and mentor, he turned and left. The difference was, Weyoun knew when to harness something dangerous for one's own use. If Foros didn't realize that, then the older man had taught Weyoun everything he could.
The Council voted to continue debate about Dominion membership, and those debates dragged on with the monsoon, one feeling tied to the other. Weyoun never wavered in his believe that the Vorta needed to join the Founders and Jem'Hadar—and unfortunately, Soltoi didn't waver in the opposite viewpoint. It was a contentious, divided, hostile Council that met two or three times a week. Hearing reports from Ground Control of Deimos's progress were bright spots, though he never knew when they'd come in. Ground Control said there were rendezvous points, first with mining freighters among the inner planets, and then with deep-system satellites, but they weren't telling when or where those rendezvous points were.
Meanwhile, the Jem'Hadar had become such a fixture that it was difficult to be concerned about them anymore. None of them had spoken to him since the day that he had talked with the Founder, but they no longer made Weyoun nervous. They were clearly in thrall to the Founder, and since she had no cause to worry about any harm from a Vorta, the Jem'Hadar had no cause to use their guns—phaser rifles, as he'd long ago learned they were called—on any Vorta.
That didn't mean that Weyoun wasn't surprised when a draft of ridiculous legislation came across his desk; a draft of legislation that proposed to co-opt Jem'Hadar phaser technology for use in Vorta guns—which of course, Vorta hadn't manufactured for centuries.
"I don't see how the Council will ever agree to this," Leto said. Her head was propped on her hand, which in turn was propped up by her elbow, resting on the table. He'd showed her the draft hoping she'd be as amused as he'd been. She was, but their conversation had turned to serious consideration of it. Scanning the padd again, she asked, "This came out of Pegrill? They're usually such liberals up there."
"They had sympathetic protests during the Kiyu Riots," Weyoun said. "But they lacked the weaponry to control the violence." The protests had managed to take out the backup comm between Tira and Pegrill, and Eris had spent several nervous days fretting about her parents' safety.
Leto nodded thoughtfully. "I've seen some of the holoimages. Mikrath University looked like a…" She hesitated, searching for the word. "Like a war zone," she finally finished, dredging up the archaism. "Still, it's surprising. Most of the Council seem to resent the Jem'Hadar carrying weapons around the Complex."
"It's the Jem'Hadar they resent," Weyoun said. Leto raised her eyebrows, no doubt at his exclusion of himself from the statement. It wasn't entirely unjustified. He was slightly better at hiding his distaste for the Jem'Hadar than many of his colleagues, particularly Soltoi, and even than Foros—though, to be fair, he could tell in the latter's case mostly through long acquaintance. He shrugged. "It's a pointless exercise in debate, anyway. Even if it passes, none of us can make the Jem'Hadar give us their weapons technology."
"The Council will spend all that time in debate and in the end what they're voting on is to ask the Jem'Hadar if, please, can we borrow a phaser rifle for a few weeks? We just want to be able to reproduce them ourselves." She shook her head, smiling sardonically. "Somehow, it's not what I expected when I decided to go into politics."
"No," Weyoun agreed. He studied her. "You wanted to make things better."
"Yes."
"Do you think you have?"
She thought about that for a long moment. "I've tried. I think you and Foros have done good things, and I like to think that I've been part of that."
"Don't be modest."
With a smile, she said, "Then yes." Her smile faded to a thoughtful expression, though, and she added, "It all pales in comparison to what the Founders are going to do, though. I feel as though we were all…clawing our way up a cliff, and it's taken us millennia just to be able to glimpse the top through the clouds. And now the Founders are here, and if all goes well we'll join the Dominion." She hesitated, then shrugged and smiled. "I guess that's what makes them gods. We spend our entire history scrabbling for our betterment, and the Founders can just give it to us."
This was exactly why Weyoun had made Leto his senior aide at such a young age. She had a higher capacity for thoughtfulness than most of the other Capitol staffers he knew, and he was about to respond to her when there was a knock on the door. Weyoun's personal assistant stuck his head in and said, "Call for you, Senator. I'd hold it but he said it was urgent."
Leto got to her feet. "More urgent than this, probably. I'll have some reelection forms for you later," she warned him.
Raising a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose wearily, he asked, "Can't you forge my thumbprint?"
"I would, but I'd hate for it to cause a scandal later on," she said cheerfully.
He shot a smile at her and, when she'd closed the door behind her, took the interface call that his personal assistant had routed to his office. When the voice on the other end came on and started speaking, sounding vaguely panicked, it took Weyoun a moment to really hear the words—not because there was some problem with the still patchy back-up comm system, but because they were so incongruous, so unbelievable, so awful, that all he could do, in the end, was say, "Don't do anything until I get there."
His staff might have been inclined to say something to him as he swept out of his offices, but the look on his face must have stopped them, because they all stayed silent, clearly able to see that something was wrong. And as he sat on the train that sped towards Ground Control, one phrase kept running through his mind; the words that Deimos's staffer, Seleth, had said to him: There's been an accident.
Deimos's office felt empty. It would, without its owner. Seleth, despite the fact that he was sitting in Deimos's chair, simply did not have the presence in the best of times to make up for the lack of Deimos's personality, and this moment was certainly not the best of times.
Seleth, face pale, slid the twisted piece of black metal and duraplastic across the desk. "The second ship recovered this," the young man said. "It's in terrible condition. But we did manage to reconstruct most of what was recorded on it."
Weyoun couldn't bring himself to touch the flight recorder. "The recording isn't still on this, is it?" he asked, nodding towards it.
"No, no, of course not. We transferred it and transcoded it to more useable format."
"I'd like to hear it."
"What?" Seleth looked startled. "It's…I can't. I'm not authorized to play it for the public."
Weyoun leaned one arm on the desk and gave the young astronomer an unblinking, dangerous look. "I am not," he said distinctly, "the public. Play the recording."
Still, Seleth hesitated. "It's not pleasant," he finally said. When Weyoun continued to stare at him, his expression unchanged, the other man sighed and swiveled in his chair towards the interface. He tapped at it for a second but then paused, his finger held over the touchscreen, before finally, with a grimace, starting the recording.
At first, all Weyoun could hear was a pervasive hum that penetrated straight though his ear drums. Was that what it was like in an orbital? That ear-piercing sound, all day, every day? He suppressed a shudder and listened more closely, trying to hear past the hum, which, gradually, he found himself able to do.
Deimos was singing. Well, not really singing, as there were no words that Weyoun could hear. Humming, then, despite the proscription on music during the monsoon. Who could blame him? There was no monsoon out there, wherever Deimos was. He'd always had a good voice—better, by far, than Weyoun's.
Then, the humming stopped and Deimos said cheerfully, "Daily systems check completed; enter all systems good; passcode alpha-alpha-seventy-two." The voice recognition system had been put into place for the first time in this generation of orbitals. The idea had been to be able to put out a distress call, even if one were physically incapacitated. After another few moments, the humming began again, but then a high, harsh tone sounded, designed to get anyone's attention and unequivocally alert them to the fact that something was happening.
"That's…interesting," Deimos said, his voice tinny and faraway on the recording. Weyoun would have given anything to see the sensor screen that his friend was surely looking at; to see what was evoking that charged understatement of a word. The tone was still sounding but Deimos said absently, "I had no idea how annoying that would be," and it stopped.
There was another long silence, thick and heavy and interminable, and then Deimos said, sounding surprised, "What are you doing out here?"
The silence continued. It was too much to hope for that Deimos might elaborate on what, or who, he was so surprised to see, and he didn't. Instead there was the humming, which Weyoun knew couldn't have gotten louder but seemed to have anyway. The alarm started again but was quickly choked off. He could imagine the scene—Deimos bent over the sensor screens, glancing out the viewports trying to spot with the naked eye whatever he'd seen. Despite the fact that the evidence to the contrary was sitting in front of him, Weyoun felt a twinge of insane hope that things turned out all right.
Then the alarm started screaming again, and this time, Deimos didn't shut it off. "What the hell?" he said, sounding baffled and disbelieving. There was a huge sound that strained at the flight recorder's abilities; it registered as a crackling roar, blowing out the audio channel, and when the noise died back there was a different alarm sounding and a loud hissing that made Weyoun's blood run cold.
"This isn't happen—" Deimos began with an edge of panic, but then another explosion—it had to be an explosion—drowned the rest of his words out.
The hissing continued, and the sound of the alarm, blaring over what had to have been atmosphere venting from the orbital, and overlaid on it Deimos's voice, chanting a frantic, "Shit-shit-shit-shit—"
Something cracked and exploded with a buzzing, electrical sound; there was a hollow thwump, as though of decompression, and what might have been someone sobbing in pain.
And then it just…ended. No static, no interference hiss, just…nothing. Silence. Like the dulled edge of a weapon, the blunt force of it took Weyoun's breath away for a long moment.
"That's all there is," Seleth said unnecessarily.
Weyoun breathed out slowly. Seleth had described the events leading up to the recovery of this recording when Weyoun had arrived at Ground Control. Three weeks ago, Deimos's ship had failed to report in as scheduled. That had been cause for mild concern, but there were many things in the solar system that could interfere with communications, and considering his location as of his last call-back—approaching the scattered disc, a distant, icy, and barely understood part of the Kurill system—it wasn't shocking. Then he hadn't hit one rendezvous point, nor the next. And it was at that point that the mission team had become alarmed and hastily sent another ship to find out what was wrong.
That, Weyoun couldn't help thinking with a sort of morbid humor, was perhaps the best proof of Deimos's absence and its effect. He would never have sent another ship to the place that one had already disappeared from if he didn't know what had caused the other one to disappear in the first place. That second ship had found only debris, and floating among it, the orbital's flight recorder.
Though he hadn't wanted to consider it when Seleth had called him, deep down, he'd known it was true. Deimos was dead. Still, hearing the proof of it, in this cold recording of the fact, was a hard shock, so hard that for a long moment he couldn't speak.
Space was a dangerous place. Deimos had said it often enough. But somehow Weyoun had never imagined that his friend would fall prey to that danger.
Licking his lips and swallowing past the painful obstruction in his throat, Weyoun asked, "Did you recover anything else?" He already knew the answer.
Seleth hesitated. "Some debris. Just pieces. Those things didn't have escape pods—"
"Did you search for the EVA suit signal?" Weyoun interrupted. He was well aware there were no escape pods. It was a concession he'd made to get the extraplanetary orbitals funded and built.
"Extensively."
Part of him wanted to demand that they send another ship out there; look harder, but he was rational. Pragmatic. Of course they'd looked—Ground Control had nothing to gain by losing a ship and an astronaut, and everything to lose. Interest in exploring the cosmos was at an all-time low. The cosmos had come to the Vorta; the Founders were among them and they'd even brought aliens. Most likely they'd put everything they could into the search, because they were at risk of having their funding cut to nothing. The Founder was making promises; promises that she'd provide data, more data than the Vorta were capable of furnishing themselves, even with the new extraplanetary orbitals.
And she'd promised security. But what was there in the Kurill system that could pose a threat? The Vorta were peaceful; outside of the slums, it was difficult to imagine civilized people killing each other. But something had happened out there in the scattered disc, something so violent that it had left nothing of Deimos's orbital but spinning scraps out there in the void.
Weyoun himself hadn't given much credence to the idea that there were bogeymen waiting out there beyond the scattered disc. He wasn't sure, even now, that he gave much credence to it. His desire for the Vorta to take their place in the Dominion was driven by other concerns, by his own conceits as much as the benefits that Kurill Prime would enjoy with membership. And a Machiavellian part of his mind wondered if, perhaps, the destruction of Deimos's orbital wasn't the result of some shadowy, malevolent force creeping around the edges of the solar system, but a result of the Founders, or the Jem'Hadar, themselves…
Before he could arrest that train of thought, it came to him: it would be so much easier to convince the Council to vote to join the Dominion if the nebulous threat against the Vorta could be shown to be concrete. And here, as if on someone's answered prayer, was the proof needed. Once the news of the accident, and Kurill Prime's most courageous and famous astronaut's death, went public, there would be no question in most people's minds that Kurill Prime needed the protection that the Founders were offering. People wanted protection. They wanted to feel safe in their homes—and now all of them, every Vorta, had a keener sense that home was their entire planet, rotating lonely and unprotected on the fringes of the galaxy; on one of the spiral's very outermost arms.
He stopped thinking about it. His friend was gone and for once, politics didn't interest him. "Have you notified his family?" Weyoun finally asked. When Seleth's face froze into an expression of guilty realization, Weyoun dismissed the oversight with a wave of his hand. "Never mind. You didn't do anything wrong." Weyoun and Deimos's friendship was well-known, their professional relationship even more so. Maybe he was the natural choice to notify first with the…bad news. Deimos didn't get along with his parents, anyway. It was one of the things that had drawn them together back in university; both of them had felt outcast from their families for one reason or another, and though Deimos's reasons had been very different from Weyoun's, they'd recognized that emotion in each other. Not that it had defined their friendship, of course, there—
He cut the train of thought off there and forced himself to concentrate on Seleth and Ground Control and the fact that this was a major disaster, because the hard obstruction in his throat felt alarmingly like the precursor to weeping, and he hadn't allowed himself that weakness—hadn't needed it— for decades. "Tell them as soon as you can," he said, and Seleth nodded, looking relieved that he hadn't been chastised.
There didn't seem to be anything else to say, but Weyoun still sat there for a moment, staring at the flight recorder. The sound of Deimos's last moments was seared onto his brain with the permanence of a hot brand on flesh. Seleth didn't speak. Weyoun appreciated that.
At last, Weyoun got heavily to his feet. "I appreciate you informing me about this," he said, knowing it sounded absurdly formal. But if a Vorta couldn't fall back on formality in such situations, what else could he do? Seleth just nodded, looking unhappy.
He turned towards the door, away from the flight recorder and the sight of Seleth sitting at Deimos's desk, but then the aide said, "Senator?" Weyoun looked back at Seleth, who couldn't seem to quite meet his eyes. "He was my friend, too," the younger man said. "I'm sorry."
For a long moment, Weyoun stared at him, then looked around the office, full of Deimos's personal effects. It was like one of Eris's anthropological digs; the stratigraphy of Deimos's life stretching back and chronicled here. This would be the last time he ever saw this room.
"I am too," Weyoun finally replied, before stepping through the door.