Disclaimer: Obviously I do not own Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and I don't own any of its characters, so consider it disclaimed.
Spoiler Alert: Contains spoilers from Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: the Dominion and Bajor.
Chapter 8
When Ro arrived at her office that morning, Bez was already there, reading something on the security computer.
"Aren't you a little early?" Ro said accusingly.
"Do you have a problem with punctuality?"
Ro decided that, since she was speaking to an unscrupulous telepath, she might as well speak her mind. "No, I have a problem with you."
"Well, you only have to worry about me for another three days. Then you can tell the Captain to transfer me back to the Alexandria."
"I…look…forward…to…it," she said, slowly enunciating each word.
Bez sighed and rolled his eyes. "I don't know what I did to make you hate me so much. Though I suppose with you it doesn't take much at all."
"That's why. I thought Betazoids were supposed to ask permission before reading people's thoughts."
"I only read the thoughts too loud for me to drown out, but I don't see why I should pretend that I don't. Most Betazoids do that, you know. Some thoughts are like shouts, but they pretend they didn't hear them to make people feel more comfortable."
"But you don't, and that's why people hate you."
Bez rested his arm on the computer screen and looked directly at her. "You don't strike me as someone who goes out of her way to make other people feel comfortable around you. That would be obvious even without my telepathy."
Ro couldn't argue with that through words, and she restrained herself from arguing with her fist.
"You know, I've met Klingons with better tempers than yours," Bez remarked. "Or is there something about me in specific you find particularly infuriating?"
"It's just you, Bez."
"I'm not after your job, you know. And I really hope you'll reconsider letting me work for you."
"Why don't you start raising my opinion of you by being quiet?" Ro suggested. "What are you reading?"
"Everything I can find on the recent massacre on Bajor."
"Ah, yes, that." Ro looked a little ashamed. "So much has happened since then, and the perpetrators disappeared so quickly…"
"There's a human saying that there is no perfect crime. Of course, there's a Tzenkethi saying that good thieves convince you there was nothing to steal in the first place, but that doesn't seem to apply to the deaths of a hundred villagers."
"Do you have any helpful insight on the subject?"
"Actually," he said, "I've been considering the possibility that the killer is hiding with the outlaws in the Badlands."
Ro wanted to throw something at him. "There's no evidence that the people in the Badlands are outlaws."
"Then why are they in the Badlands?" Bez asked, clearly expecting Ro to take it as an incontrovertible point.
Ro sighed and rubbed her nose ridges. It would be a long three days.
"There's a ship coming through the Wormhole," Tenmei said. "It's sending a distress signal. And venting plasma."
"Can you identify it?" Vaughn asked.
"It's a Dominion ship. I'm opening a channel."
A female Vorta appeared on the screen. "Deep Space Nine, this is the Dominion ship Ti'irok. We have an emergency. Requesting immediate assistance."
Kira walked out of her office and addressed the Vorta. "What's your condition?"
"Our ship was damaged by an unidentified astrological phenomenon while patrolling the edges of Dominion space. The Wormhole was closer to our position than any Dominion outpost. Please, I'm not sure how much longer my ship will hold together."
"At the rate they're venting plasma," Tenmei ventured, "they could have a warp core breach at any moment."
Vaughn looked expectantly at Kira.
"What's your name?" Kira asked the Vorta.
"Dikana," she answered, looking confused at the request. Her bridge was full of smoke, through which Jem'hadar could be seen fading in and out of the background.
"Cut power to your engines, Dikana. We'll pull you in with a tractor beam."
"Thank you." The screen went blank.
"They've cut engines. I'm pulling them in." Tenmei pressed the appropriate buttons.
"Captain, I think we should alert security," Vaughn suggested. "Not that I don't trust the Dominion, but…"
"But you don't trust the Dominion. I'll notify Ro." Kira touched her combadge, but before she could speak, the lights flickered and alarms started blaring.
"I'm picking up a power surge on all decks," Tenmei informed them, raising her voice to be heard over the noise. "I think it came from the Dominion ship through the tractor beam. Weapons, shields, and internal sensors are offline."
Five Jem'hadar beamed into Ops.
Kira's eyes widened. Before she had time to think, she had a phaser in her hand. The Jem'hadar were armed both with phaser rifles and blades. They clearly meant business.
Kira's phaser dropped one of them before they could fire a shot. As they focused their attention on her, the other crew members burst into action, punching, tripping, and generally crowding the outnumbered Jem'hadar. Vaughn, using martial arts moves that looked unnatural coming from a man his age, dropped one Jem'hadar alone before another one turned his weapon on him. Kira fired, killing Vaughn's attacker. A phaser blast grazed her as she threw herself into a roll. The other two were overwhelmed and incapacitated within seconds.
"Is anyone hurt?" Kira asked.
"Only you." Vaughn pointed to the blood staining the left arm of her uniform. "You need to get to the infirmary right away. That blast may have delivered anticoagulants."
"Later. Tenmei, status?"
"Reports are coming in from all over the station. There are Jem'hadar on the Promenade, in the habitat ring, in Quark's…"
At the moment, Quark's bar was a case study in pandemonium. Six Jem'hadar had beamed in to the middle of the casino and immediately started shooting randomly. The customers that hadn't ducked behind or beneath something were screaming and running around chaotically.
Quark's instincts told him to duck behind his counter, but more basic instincts told him to protect his bar, and thus his profits. He grabbed the closest thing in sight—a bottle of synthehol—and threw it squarely at the nearest Jem'hadar's head. He didn't react in the slightest to the broken glass and reddish liquid dripping down his face. He stoically continued to terrorize the crowd.
Treir, the tall, green-skinned Orion dabo girl, ran out of the kitchen area wielding two knives, one in each hand. She cleared the bar in a single leap and threw herself into one of the attackers. She let go of one of her knives (the one stuck in his neck) and twisted the phaser out of his hands. She aimed it at the next nearest Jem'hadar, but he knocked it away. Instead of letting go, Treir swung the heavy gun around and hit him in the head. He stopped his fall with an arm on the countertop, but before he could push himself off to kill the insolent dabo girl, someone tapped on his shoulder. He glanced over in time to see a beefy Lurian fist heading for his nose.
Morn pushed the unconscious Jem'hadar to the floor, grabbed a barstool, and hit another Jem'hadar over the head with it.
"Morn!" Treir shouted. When she saw she had his attention, she round kicked a Jem'hadar in the head. As he staggered backward, Morn dropped the barstool in his path. The Jem'hadar fell backward and hit his head on the floor. The last thing he saw was the barstool he'd just tripped over about to connect with his face.
Morn snatched the phaser rifle out of Treir's hand and took out another one. The remaining two turned their rifles towards him, but he threw the rifle in his hands at one of them, hitting him hard in the face. He realized too late that there was nothing he could do about the other one and flinched as he expected a phaser blast to end his life any moment. When it didn't come, he opened his eyes to see the Jem'hadar collapse with Treir's other knife in his stomach. She took his phaser rifle and put him and the other Jem'hadar out of their misery.
Morn and Treir looked around the bar, searching for casualties and any Jem'hadar they'd missed. Then they looked at each other.
"Are you okay?" Treir asked with sincere concern.
Morn was too winded to speak, and only nodded.
Treir's face broke into a smile. "We make a good team."
Morn smiled back.
"I think I'm going to be sick," said Quark, peeking out at them from behind the bar.
Someone cut the lights on the Promenade. Ro swore harshly and turned on the flashlight attached to her phaser. She heard phaser fire in the level above. She aimed her light towards it, and saw Deputy Arkra trying to fend off a Jem'hadar. The attacker tore Arkra's phaser out of his hand, grabbed him by the chest, and tossed him over the railing.
"Arkra!" Ro shouted in dismay. She reflexively fired her phaser at the Jem'hadar, who fell forward over the railing himself.
Ro ran over to her fallen colleague. She kicked the Jem'hadar's body away, then checked Arkra's vitals. He wasn't breathing.
"No!" She hit her combadge. "Ro to Bashir, we have a medical emergency on the Promenade."
"In case you haven't noticed, Ro," Bashir replied harshly, "the entire Promenade is a medical emergency! I'm afraid you'll have to do whatever you can there for the moment."
Ro heard screams in the dark from several directions, but she didn't want to leave Arkra if there was any chance of saving him.
"I'll take care of him. Don't worry. Go."
She looked up. The contours of Bez's face were barely visible from the light of Ro's dropped phaser.
"You know this station better than I do. I'll do what can for him." Bez dropped to his knees, checked Arkra's airway, felt for broken ribs, then started CPR.
"Thankyou," Ro breathed before grabbing her phaser and running in the direction of the nearest screams.
Nshevalth hadn't known what to think when the lights cut out in her café. She told her customers to stay calm, then walked out to see what was happening. Her eyes sucked in any stray photon, allowing her to see more than the humanoids could. And what she saw confused her. Jem'hadar had beamed onto the station in scattered packets of five or less. In a situation in which they were heavily outnumbered, Jem'hadar usually bunched together. But she didn't puzzle over it too long. She thought of the friends she'd lost to the Jem'hadar, and her husband, who would be in the thick of the fighting. These thoughts extinguished the spark of fear that the Jem'hadar initially inspired in her. She unhesitantly leaped over the railing. Her foot kicked out and broke the neck of a Jem'hadar right before she reached the floor, and she used his body to cushion her fall.
A bright light approached her. She looked up. The glaring beam almost—almost—blinded her to the large Jem'hadar silently running up behind the unsuspecting flashlight wielder.
Nshevalth grabbed the rifle. "Duck!" she shouted.
Whoever it was realized in time that the warning was directed at her and fell to the ground in a roll. Nshevalth shot the Jem'hadar pursuer.
Ro heard the sound of a blade hitting the floor. She pointed her flashlight to it. Right behind it was the body of the Jem'hadar, slightly over a meter away. In another second, she would have been a dead woman. The flashlight's beam then sought out the face of her rescuer.
Nshevalth closed her eyes against the brightness. "Turn that thing off; every Jem'hadar on the station is going to use it to target you."
"Nshevalth?" Ro gasped, lowering her light, but not turning it off. "What are you doing here? You're a civilian!"
"I'm a trained Tzenkethi warrior, and I can see better in low light than you or any other humanoid on this station. And I'm helping whether you like it or not." She shot another Jem'hadar who had taken aim at the security chief's flashlight.
Ro raised her light to look at the dead Jem'hadar, then she finally took Nshevalth's advice and turned it off. "Alright. Come on. We need to get to Ops."
There was still enough ambient light filtering in from sections of the station that still had power for Nshevalth to navigate by. She grasped Ro by the shoulder and led her through the Promenade, shooting any Jem'hadar she spotted along the way.
Two Jem'hadar were approaching. Bez couldn't see them, but he could feel their thoughts. So focused. The Jem'hadar were the most single-minded species Bez had ever encountered. These two were eager to kill anything they came across, but that wasn't their primary motive, just their method. They would kill or maim or break things until they were killed. This was a suicide mission.
Bez knew that they would find him, and that he should run, but he still sensed Arkra's pagh, or whatever it was, struggling to cling to his injured body. Bez couldn't leave him. But if the Jem'hadar found them, they would both die.
Bez wished, not for the first time, that he had been on his planet when it defeated the Dominion occupying force. He felt guilty that so many of his people had died for their homeworld while he was off fighting other battles. But now was the first time that he wished he'd been there for a more practical reason: if he'd learned the dangerous and controversial telepathic technique that the Betazoids used against the Jem'hadar, he could use it to save the station.
But he had to make do with what he had. He remembered seeing a Jem'hadar corpse nearby when Ro was there. He left Arkra for a moment and felt around the floor until he found the body. He took the Jem'hadar's large knife out of its sheath.
The two Jem'hadar were about to trip over them when they detected Bez's presence. With a wordless battle cry, Bez slashed the knife towards the closest one. He empathically registered the Jem'hadar's pain, but his enemy didn't go down, instead he backhanded Bez, knocking him to the ground. Bez's grunt of pain allowed both Jem'hadar to pinpoint his location, and they both dove for him. Bez managed to roll out of the way, then lifted himself to his feet. His head was pounding. He could only tell the distance of the Jem'hadar by how clearly he could hear their thoughts; he couldn't tell their direction. But he could tell that they knew he was nearby. He decided to try something crazy. Guessing at their approximate positions, he moved between them, then he let the knife clatter to the ground, and followed it an instant later.
The sound of the knife was followed almost immediately by the flash of phaser rifles, and then two dull thuds as the Jem'hadar, hit by each other's weapons, fell to the floor.
Bez crawled back to Arkra's side, and continued work on keeping the other deputy alive.
Ro and Nshevalth found eight Jem'hadar outside Ops. Not good odds. Ro knew the only advantage she had was the Tzenkethi's eyes, but she decided that whatever was happening there, the crew would need help.
"Cover me," Ro said, then ran through the group of Jem'hadar, firing her weapon blindly. They fired back, but their aim was equally impaired. Nshevalth took out half of them as they focused on Ro. A serendipitous shot from Ro killed another one.
At that moment, the turbolift doors opened, and a light shone out.
"No!" Ro cried.
The remaining three Jem'hadar took aim at whoever was in the turbolift. The light veered sharply to the side as the new arrival took cover from the onslaught of phaser fire. Nshevalth killed another one. Ro shot a Jem'hadar standing right next to her. The last was taken down by a phaser shot from the turbolift. Then there was silence. The flashlight beam washed over the Jem'hadar corpses.
"You would be dead if you chose to make your entrance a minute ago," Ro said critically.
"Then I'm lucky I didn't." It was Kira's voice. "And you might be dead if I decided to make my entrance a minute later. Who's that with you?"
"Nshevalth," she said. "She can see better in low light than we can. Or the Jem'hadar, luckily. How are things in Ops?"
"Five Jem'hadar beamed in, but we took care of them. When we figured out there were no lights on the Promenade, I decided I should come and see what I could do."
"Brilliant," Ro said in a tone more sarcastic than she would usually use with her commanding officer.
"I don't understand," Nshevalth remarked. "If the Jem'hadar in Ops were killed, why are these Jem'hadar waiting outside it? They couldn't have expected anyone to leave Ops at a time like this."
"I don't know," Kira said, "but we should go see where else they might be making trouble." Assuming the role of leader, Kira began walking.
"Captain, you might want to turn off the light and let Nshevalth lead," Ro suggested. "That way, the Jem'hadar won't see us before we see them."
Kira signaled her agreement by turning off her light. She and Ro walked next to Nshevalth—close enough to keep in physical contact—and she led them along the upper floor of the Promenade. They came upon a group of five Jem'hadar outside the upper entrance to Quark's, but the three women dispatched them with little difficulty. Then they continued.
Nshevalth?
She suddenly stopped.
"What is it?" Ro asked.
"Shh!"
Burnau. Where are you?
Listen, the Jem'hadar are on a suicide mission…
That explains why they're keeping in small groups. They're trying to draw us away from something. What?
The security office! They must be after Taran'atar! Oh dear gods! Deputy Minelli!
I'm with Ro right now. We're on our way.
She turned to her companions. "That was Burnau. We have to get to the security office."
"How did you…? Okay, that's creepy," Ro said, but she turned in her tracks and started towards her office.
"Watch out!" Nshevalth warned.
Ro froze. "Where?"
"Uh, you were just about to trip over a body," Nshevalth explained, a bit sheepishly.
"Maybe you should lead. You know your way to the security office?" Kira asked.
"Yes. My husband does work there, after all."
They arrived a minute later. Ro turned on her flashlight, then gasped at what she saw. Deputy Minelli, a half-human, half-Bolian Starfleet security officer, was spread out on the floor, dead. A Jem'hadar corpse mirrored his position in the opposite direction. Ro jumped over the body and ran to the holding cells.
Taran'atar was gone.
"Why would they go through all this trouble to take him?" Nshevalth wondered aloud.
"It could be to punish him. He disobeyed a Founder, and the Dominion doesn't look kindly on Jem'hadar who do that," Kira speculated. Then added to herself, "but somehow I doubt it."
The next morning, Ro walked in to Kira's office with a damage assessment.
"Including Ethanthoras Minelli, four dead," she informed her.
"Considering the situation, I'd say we were lucky," Kira noted.
Ro nodded half-heartedly. "Over eighty injured, some seriously."
"Arkra?" Kira asked.
"Dr. Bashir thinks he'll make a full recovery, but we came very close to losing him." Ro shifted and glanced down. "On another matter, in light of his actions during the crisis, I've decided to keep Lieutenant Bez around."
"I'm glad to hear that," Kira said with a smile.
"Well, he saved Arkra's life, and Nshevalth saved mine. And without Minelli…"
"You don't have to explain yourself. How many Jem'hadar died?"
Though she kept herself from smiling, Ro couldn't quite hide her satisfaction. "Forty-eight. Thirty-nine were killed in the fighting, the others commit suicide after being captured."
"It doesn't make sense," Kira said. "Why would they sacrifice so many soldiers to rescue one rebel Jem'hadar?"
"I don't know. But I don't think we're going to like the answer."
Taran'atar awoke in a Dominion brig.
"I lost all but three of my Jem'hadar," he heard someone say, trying hard to sound like she was joking, rather than complaining. "I hope he's worth it."
"I do, too. You may go."
The prisoner watched the female Vorta leave. The Founder walked over and looked down at him.
"Why am I here?" Taran'atar demanded.
"Considering your history, Dikana thought it a prudent precaution."
"I understand why I am behind a forcefield. Why have you rescued me?"
The Founder smiled. "I have a job for you." He began pacing calmly. "You disobeyed a direct order from a Founder, from a god…"
"Odo is not a god!" Taran'atar spat. "And neither are you."
"I understand why you might say that. Odo has renounced his birthright, and betrayed everything that he is. He is not worthy to be called Founder. But I understand my destiny. I know that the purpose of the Dominion…is conquest."
"That doesn't explain why you brought me here."
"You disobeyed Odo. You defied Odo. I wonder…if you would be able to kill Odo."
"Kill Odo…" Taran'atar tasted the words. Then he stared directly at Laas. "Why would I kill Odo and not you? Odo at least does not lie and claim to be a god."
"But Odo is the one who sent you to go to the Alpha Quadrant. He exiled you from your people and forced you to go against your own nature. He's a threat to everything the Dominion stands for. He wants to remake the Jem'hadar into weaklings. I can't order any of my troops to kill him because they are programmed not to harm a Founder. But you have already broken your programming. I believe that you can."
"So do I," Taran'atar admitted.
"Then you will do it?"
The Jem'hadar glared at Laas hatefully. "I'll think about it."
"That's all I ask."