The Last Temptation of Odo ? Chapter 3
By
Creek Johnson and Nance Hurt
Disclaimer: We are but fleas on the elephants? posterior that is Paramount.
No infringement on their rights is intended. We hope none is taken.
The Founder strode out of a small side door to the castle and made his way quickly to the private courtyards in the back, his robes flapping around him. Reaching a side door in the wall, he punched in an access code and paused in the doorway, his heart skipping a beat.
Before him, nearly filling the courtyard to capacity, sat the Outsiders ship. ?Beautiful, beautiful,? he whispered to himself, his fingers twitched in anticipation. The hatch had been open when they found the ship, which was a small disappointment; he had been looking forward to cracking the ship open like a nut.
He circled the ship a few times, whispering words of approval, before he stepped through the hatch. He paused on the threshold his eyes alight in anticipation. Nodding his head, he moved to each station surveying the damage. There was more damage than he had anticipated, but that only made the puzzle more interesting. He sat at the pilots console and smiled at the still glowing controls.
?Lovely,? he said softly to himself, his hands stroked the smooth control panel ?Just lovely.? So engrossed was he that he never noticed the short figure slipping out the back of the ship.
The Vorta paused at the hatchway and listened for any signs of pursuit before slipping through and hurrying away from the ship as quickly as possible. Once out of the courtyard, he paused to catch is breath, his sweaty hands clutching the data he had downloaded. Thankfully, it had not taken him long to find what he had been looking for. The one called Julian had been meticulous in keeping what he referred to as a ?personal log?.
Hearing a sound, he froze in place. Footsteps. Quickly hiding his prize within the sleeve of his coat, he walked as nonchalantly as he could toward the approaching figure.
?Have you tired of the toy so quickly?? asked the Jem?Hadar, stopping to brush crumbs from the front of his tunic.
?It?s?It?s not as?big?as I had expected.?
?No. It?s some sort of mid-range transportation. Changes are it belongs to a much, much larger vessel.?
?Do?do you think someone will come looking for them??
?Eventually,? agreed the Jem?Hadar. ?I am just going to speak to him about that. You know how he likes his toys.?
?Only too well,? admitted the Vorta. The Founders fascination with technology was the bane of their existence.
?You know,? said the Jem?Hadar, confidentially. ?I?m beginning to think that perhaps we should not have disbursed the occupants of this ship.?
?You are?? The Vorta was genuinely surprised. Perhaps he had not acted rashly after all.
?Yes,? said the Jem?Hadar, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ?When their shipmates come looking for them and we have to give them the bad news, it would be so much more convincing if we could provide a corpse or two as proof.?
Be careful what you wish for, thought the Vorta, as he scurried on his way.
Gasping for air, Vivian Landis struggled to her feet. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she managed to stagger a few feet before her knees gave way and she found herself abruptly sitting on the ground. Reaching for her pack, she found a canister of water and rinsed her mouth. Damn, she thought, this was worse than the first time she experienced a transporter beam.
Transporter beam, she thought, of course. She reached for the tricorder. Activating the device, she found no readings for the runabout, nor did she find any sign of the others. She activated her comm.
?Landis to Bashir.? No response.
?Landis to Odo.? Silence.
?Landis to Quark.? Nothing.
?Landis to Runabout.? There was a faint crackle of static. Well, she thought, wherever the runabout was, it was still operational, but the comm. system was still down.
?Okay,? she said to herself. ?Look for the big red x on the map that says ?You Are Here?. She looked around her and found she was in the middle of a plowed field. Not far behind her, hanging limp, it?s clothes flapping in the breeze, was what she assumed was a scarecrow. A farm, she thought. If there?s a farm, then the farmer shouldn?t be too far away.
A large black bird circled overhead and landed on the shoulder of the scarecrow. It eyed her carefully before flying away. She watched the bird as it wheeled upon the wind and flew to the far corner of the field. A slight movement caught her eye. A lone figure walked slowly along what she supposed was a road.
Gathering up her belongings, she set out across the field in pursuit.
?Bashir to anybody.?
No response.
Julian looked around him again. Where the runabout should have been there was nothing but rock. No river, no familiar landmarks at all. Nothing but rocks and more rocks. He was on the slope of a foothill. A ravine lay below him, mountainous terrain above. He considered himself to have been fortunate he had emerged from whatever that field was that surrounded the runabout onto the only footpath in the area. Two feet more to the right and he would have been on the gravel slope leading to a precipitous drop into the ravine. Two feet more to the left and he would have landed among a collection of small round boulders on the slope up to the mountains.
He turned away from the boulders and scanned the area below. So sign of any life forms. Perhaps, he thought, the tricorder had been damaged as well, or merely needed recalibrating. He carefully closed the tricorder, thinking he had heard a sound not unlike whispering. Standing still, he listened carefully. Again he heard a soft sound.
Casually, he opened his tricorder again and turned towards the sound. The tricorder read nothing - nothing but rocks.
Thinking his rather abrupt transport from wherever he had been to wherever he was now had caused some minor neurological problems; he turned the tricorder on himself. Again, registering nothing, he started to dig into his pack for the small toolkit. His eyes narrowed as he could have sworn he heard a faint laugh.
Very well, he thought, someone is playing a game with me. Moving away from the rocks, he took a few determined steps before turning back as quickly as possible.
He could have sworn the rocks moved.
Slinging his pack across his shoulders, he set off up the track as fast as he could move. He only made it a few meters when an outcropping of boulders on his left suddenly stood up and blocked his path.
Quark stabbed a stick into the miserable little fire and cursed his luck. The wind and the rain kept the embers from giving off any heat, but he was profoundly grateful for what little light if offered up to dispel the darkness of the forest.
Stepping backwards through the force field that surrounded the runabout, he had found himself in the dark. Thinking momentarily, he had gone blind, he was startled when he inadvertently backed into something solid. It was a tree, he knew that now, but in the panic of the moment, he ran. He had run headfirst into several trees before realizing it was night and he was in a forest. He touched his forehead and found it still tender.
After the panic had worn off he had been grateful that no one was around to see him in his battered condition. Now, he would give anything for a little company. He snapped the stick in two and tossed it on the fire, reminding himself he was alive and if he were alive then he was sure the rest of his party were alive as well. It was just a matter of finding them. He activated his comm. again.
?Quark to Runabout.? Static.
He glanced up as the wind set the branches high above him in groaning movement. Perhaps in the morning things would be looking up. Fresh rain drove twigs and leaves down upon his upturned face. It certainly couldn?t get any worse, he thought.
Hearing an unfamiliar noise, he glanced nervously around. Not far from his makeshift camp, he could see several pairs of eyes glowing in the dark.
Odo was in torment.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the small garden, the tiny stone temple, the lush bamboo at his back, and the peaceful little stream that flowed happily through the garden, gurgling past him in its journey to join the river below.
His passage through the force field had left him weak, unable to hold his shape. How long he had remained in his natural state, he had no idea. Eventually, his senses returned, and he had found himself in a narrow valley, on the banks of a river. All attempts to hail the runabout had met with failure. All attempts to hail his companions had been as fruitless. He had assumed the steep walls of the valley had prevented him from locating then with his tricorder. He was alone.
Fighting back the fear that had gripped him since arriving on KuruTame, he reasoned that if this planet were like Bajor, then some sort of settlement must be found on the banks of the river. It would just be a matter of walking until he found a village or city of some sort. Scanning the water and finding no flotsam to indicate the presence of humanoids upstream of his location, he decided going downstream was as good a choice as any.
He had walked for what seemed to be hours before coming across the small garden on the banks of the river. As he walked his fear lessened only to be replaced by a growing depression. By the time he had reached the garden, Odo found himself nearly writhing in self-torment.
He upbraided himself for being foolish enough to have come on this fools errand in the first place. He railed at himself for thinking that once they had known the planet had been in the hands of the Dominion, even if Dominion troops were long gone, that his presence would do anything put place his companions in danger, for no friend of a Founder could ever be safe in a former Dominion colony.
He laughed bitterly at the thought of his desire to go off on his own. He had volunteered to be the one to seek help because he had reasoned that if it were discovered he was a Changeling and subsequently captured or killed he would be able to disassociate himself from the rest, buying them time to escape. Well, he thought, he was on his own and as far as he knew, the rest of his companions were lost, captured, or?worse.
He stared at the tiny stone temple before him. Sitting perched atop a short carved stone pillar; it resembled nothing more than a small house. He had to be near a village, for at the front of the tiny door, someone had placed offerings of flower petals, grain, and small discs he took to be coins of some sort.
Rather than finding comfort in the evidence of civilization, he felt his heart sink as he thought of Nerys. Useless, that was what he had been reduced to. What had Quark called him, an embarrassment? She deserved so much more than a failure and an embarrassment. The only thing he had been good at was now most likely to be denied him.
A strong wind suddenly brushed the garden scattering the flower petals and rustling the bamboo behind him. He stiffened as he realized there were other noises in the bamboo as well. He rose and spun around to face the source of the noise. The curtain of bamboo parted to reveal the face of a Jem?Hadar.
He braced himself for what was to come. But to his amazement, the Jem?Hadar merely giggled and disappeared back into the cover of the plants.
The Vorta slipped quietly out of the communications center and glanced around grateful the castle was quiet at this time of night.
It had taken him hours to patch together the message, using bits and pieces of the recordings left behind by the one called Julian. He had inserted bits of static to cover the places where the edits were more obvious, but with any luck, no one would look too closely.
Getting the message transmitted to the orbital platform and then sent on its way via subspace was a little more risky. He had been forced to wait until late at night, when only a few of the guards were on duty. Not that they would have questioned him, they were his guards after all, and no one questioned the Vorta. However, he knew to be cautious, just in case.
As he made his way back to his chambers, he wondered where this Deep Space Nine was located in the vastness of space and what the people who resided there were like.
Locking the door behind him, he sat at the computer console. Activating a program, he looked at the crude planetary radar map that appeared on the screen. Four dots, miles apart from each other, blinked at him. He wondered which one was Julian.
Vivian Landis was tired and getting just a little angry. She had been walking for hours and there was still no sign of any one except the old man she was following and there was something odd about him.
Shortly after she started following him she began to suspect something wasn?t right. It had taken her some time to cross the field and she was surprised once she gained the road that he was less than half a kilometer away. Starting off at a trot in an effort to close the distance between them, she was surprised to find he remained a little less than half a kilometer away.
Eventually, she did locate a small cottage she assumed belonged to the farmer and having turned off the road, only to find no one home, returned to the road, to find the old man was still a little less than half a kilometer away. Throughout the day, she had conducted little experiments to see if she could get around what she was beginning to think of as the half-kilo barrier. At times she would slow her pace to a stroll, at others she would break out into a run, sometimes she would just find a shady place along the road and sit for awhile. Once, she even reversed course, but it made no difference, when she turned around he was just a half-kilometer behind her.
She looked around; the terrain had changed somewhat since she had found herself in the field earlier. Rather than the flat fields, the land began to gently roll. Still farmland, she noted the fields were now separated by low stone fences. As she watched, the shadows lengthened across the fields. It would be night soon and her thoughts turned to finding a place to camp for the night. Bryan would be sorry he missed all this, she thought. At least she would have a good story to tell the kids.
She glanced for her guide only to find he had disappeared over a hill. She wondered for a moment what would happen if she were to suddenly leap over the nearest fence and run for all she was worth. Would the old man also leap the fence? Would he also run? The moment passed and with resignation, she walked up the incline.
She had almost reached the top, when a large black bird landed on the stone fence nearest to her. The bird seemed to size her up for a moment before flapping its wings loudly and flying off. The sun was setting quickly, and she longed for a bed. Cresting the hill, she wondered if there was some sort of settlement nearby, a barn at least where she could settle down for the night.
She heard a faint rustling sound like the sound a paper kite makes when caught on the breeze. Glancing up, she found herself face to face with a giant glowing head.
They had been walking for hours. Julian found the terrain hard enough to navigate with his hands free, the strong hands of his captors grasping his upper arms made the journey nearly impossible.
Hearing shouts from the men in the lead, he looked up to find a small camp on a clearing. Two of his captors were talking to a third. The third man was much like the others, short in stature, round headed, their skin the color of the rocks around them, their features, eyes, ears, nose and mouth little more than slits in the skin. With a curt nod, the third man approached him.
?You are fortunate,? he said, looking closely at Julian. ?My men usually do not bother with those foolish enough to wander these mountains alone. Judging by your clothing, you are not from this area, so we suppose you are a traveler. Where is your jutuba??
Julian was slightly taken aback as he watched the man tilt his head to the side. The head moved at an alarming angle, almost entirely sideways. The man blinked, waiting for an answer.
?I?? he began and stopped, conscious he was tilting his head in imitation. He straightened up mustering what dignity he could. ?I am a doctor. I have no jutuba that I know of.?
?A doctor!? The man issued a series of orders and Julian found himself roughly released. ?We shall not allow you to die then. You shall tend to our wounds and be a Bandit like us.?
?But?? Julian?s protestations were drowned in the general shout that erupted from the band of men. He looked at them more closely. There must have been thirty men in the camp, most of who were injured in some way. He sighed. This was not the trip he had envisioned.
?Nice doggy,? said Quark, waiving the blazing end of the log at the creature nearest to him. The beasts would back off a bit before another would make a lunge at him.
He had tried shouting, to no avail. He had tried bribery, but they only ate all his rations before clearly deciding he would be the main course. He sincerely wanted to run, but they were big creatures, with big teeth, and he had do doubt they could out run him.
?Nice try,? he said, clipping one on the nose and was pleased to hear it yelp in pain. ?Anyone else want to try??
The beasts had backed off a bit, but had clearly not given up. Quark waited, he had no idea of the time, but the sun had to be coming up soon. With any luck the dawn would drive them away.
Instead, it started to rain. The blaze died down to red-hot embers, which eventually flickered and sizzled as the rain poured down and Quark watched in horror as what little fire was left went out entirely. He waived the thin log at the beasts in defiance and screamed as one lunged forward catching the log and pulling it out of his hands.
He backed away thinking that maybe running wasn?t such a bad idea after all. He was just about to turn and run when he felt a hot blast of air on his neck.
He turned and found himself looking into the long face of the biggest animal he had ever seen.
The children ran happily before Odo, their Jem?Hadar masks pushed back on their heads. They had not given him their names, seemingly content to talk nonstop about the everyday workings of their village, as though he were not a stranger. From them he had been able to piece together, I knew they were brother and sister, that it was time for the Spring Festivals, and that there was some type of celebration currently underway in the village. They had assured him that merriment was to be had for one and all.
He had tried to convince them that not all strangers were welcome, that perhaps, he should wait here in the garden until invited. Apparently these were children who had never in their lives met a stranger and looking at the remote location of the village, he could believe it were true.
Following behind them at a more leisurely pace, he reached a place where the path from the river turned into a much wider road. Taking the turn as he had seen the children do, he found himself at the edge of a square. At the far end stood a group of adults, gathered in a tight knot as though seeking protection. Near them a group of children stood, all wearing the straw Jem-Hadar masks. The children began to chant and waive their arms at him.
Puzzled for a moment, he turned and glanced behind him, thinking he had inadvertently stumbled into the middle of some sort of village play or ceremony. Hearing a shout, he turned back to the assembled villagers.
One man approached. He looked like an older version of the children, the same thin v shaped face that seemed to sweep dramatically upwards from the chin to end in a head of spiky black hair, the same features, eyes, ears, nose and mouth nothing more than slits in the skin. Before him, he held aloft some manner of long thick stick and Odo instantly recognized the deliberate and exaggerated steps of the publicly intoxicated. Odo settled his weight more solidly in his legs and crossed his arms across his chest. Anyone this drunk and armed, even if only with a stick, was a public menace.
With a high pitched shout the man brought the stick up over his head in a sweeping motion that nearly caused him to loose his balance. Regaining his composure, but not his dignity, he stamped his feet and paused as though expecting Odo to reciprocate. Odo refused to budge.
There was a murmur from the crowd. The man, somewhat at a loss, shouted again and brought the stick down and across his body in a dramatic gesture. Odo could see the pleading in the man?s eyes as though he were begging him to cooperate. The crowd waited in silence. Having no idea what was expected of him, Odo took a step forward and stomped his feet.
A murmur of approval came from the villagers. He looked at the man with the stick and noted a fleeting look of relief cross his face. He shouted again and swept the stick in an arching motion before him three times before halting, the point of the stick pointed directly at Odo. Having no idea what was expected from him, Odo uncrossed his arms, clapped his hands and said quite loudly. ?Ha!?
A gasp rose from the crowd and before Odo could apologize for his ignorance, the man raised the stick high above his head and, screaming at the top of his lungs, ran headlong towards him.