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"Cardassia will be made whole."
Benjamin Sisko wished this was nothing more than a terrible dream. But it wasn't, this was real life. He was still stunned by what had happened when the Dominion fleets poured into the Alpha Quadrant through the wormhole; the failure of their attempt to collapse the wormhole's entrance was bad enough, and there was only one answer that covered it, but Sisko was unsure what was the most shocking.
The fact someone had sabotaged the station or the fact Gul Dukat had pretended to be their ally until it was too late...
Sisko had always had a hands-off relationship with Dukat. He had never truly trusted the Cardassian once despite having worked with him once or twice; the secrets he had kept during the mess with the Maquis and his casual brutality masked under his normally smooth manner had made it hard to like him.
Besides there was also the fact as the final Prefect of Bajor during the Occupation, Dukat was responsible for the deaths of millions as part of the Cardassians' view of the Bajorans as inferior beings for their religious views and their practices.
But now he knew he would never trust the Cardassian again.
A transmission had just been received, sent from Cardassian-Dominion space, and Sisko had summoned his senior staff to watch it in the wardroom. The speech Dukat, who had usurped the position of Leader of the Cardassian Union (a part of him wondered if the Detapa Council had been executed yet; after the way, they had dismissed Dukat's proposition to use the captured Bird of Prey as a weapon against the Klingons and focus on diplomacy, and how they had dismissed him when Ziyal was revealed, Sisko would have expected it by now) was giving.
The speech was just as anyone who knew - and was privately disgusted by Dukat - would expect; it was basically how he had seen Cardassia had been weakened by the Klingon war, the Council had lost its way, and that he was the only one who had the nerve to be the one to save Cardassia. The last part was typical of someone as egotistical as Dukat.
"…You might ask, should we fear joining the Dominion? And I answer you, not in the least. We should embrace the opportunity. The Dominion recognises us for what we are. The true leaders of the Alpha Quadrant. And now that we are joined together, equal partners in all endeavours, the only people with anything to fear will be our enemies. My oldest son's birthday is in five days. To him and to Cardassians everywhere, I make the following pledge. By the time his birthday dawns, there will not be a single Klingon alive inside Cardassian territory or a single Maquis colony left within our borders.
Painfully Sisko's mind flashed back to his previous encounters with the Klingons over the last two years, and the Maquis a year before that. The Klingons had set up a number of bases in Cardassian space, with the Dominion now joining the Cardassians the Jem'Hadar were likely slaughtering them all without any kind of mercy.
His mind flashed back to the nagging feeling within his chest as he remembered how Cal had told him the Federation had given away too much to appease the Cardassians. A part of him, deep down, was more than aware the Cardassians were greedy, that they were cruel.
And that his old friend who had betrayed his uniform had been right about them the whole time.
Benjamin knew many in Starfleet would be pleased to see the back of the Maquis, as horrifying as that was given their society, but it was the truth.
The monitor Dukat was using zoomed into his face. "Cardassia will be made whole. All that we have lost will be ours again, and anyone who stands in our way will be destroyed. This I vow with my life's blood. For my son, for all our sons."
"Somebody tell me this is a bad dream," Jadzia whispered, the horror in her voice catching.
"It's no dream," Sisko whispered as he turned around to face his staff and friends, the repercussions of what Dukat and the Cardassians had done already making him feel violently sick.
The Dominion now had an ally and a major foothold into the Alpha Quadrant, but what Sisko wanted to know although he knew it would likely be impossible to truly work out was when Dukat had succeeded in making a deal with the Dominion when it had been reported to him the Female Changeling had told Garak the Cardassian people were doomed after Enabrain Tain's attack on the Founder's former homeworld. "Well, I've got a vow to make too. Next time I see Dukat I'm going to kill him," Kira whispered without taking her eyes off of the monitor.
The look on her face, the hatred burning there, scared him because Sisko knew that she would follow through with her threat. But Sisko did not have the time for promises like this. It was time to really get down to work. "Right now we have a more immediate concern. Such as who sabotaged our graviton emitters?"
"I don't know who it was, but they did a pretty thorough job," O'Brien said. "The emitters had the exact opposite effect to what we'd intended. They were supposed to collapse the wormhole's spatial matrix and close it forever. Instead, they made the matrix even more stable. Not even trilithium explosives could destroy it now."
Sisko sighed at the news, while Dax summarised the long-term issue. "So the Dominion can send reinforcements through the wormhole whenever they want."
"Looks like it's time for another round of blood screenings," Julian said smoothly for the first time; Sisko stared at him in surprise because it was rare for him to be so quiet, but what he said made so much sense. "Obviously we have a changeling infiltrator on the station."
"What makes you think it's a changeling?" Jadzia asked.
"That's who I'd send," Bashir replied like it was obvious, and Sisko agreed with his insight.
The Dominion had the perfect spies, and their 'Gods' wanted to dismantle the Federation piece by piece and impose their own version of order on this part of the galaxy. "I think Julian's right," Kira said slowly. "Odo tells me that a Bajoran maintenance engineer has been missing ever since the Dominion fleet arrived in the Alpha Quadrant."
"And if that was our changeling, he's either gone or assumed a new identity," Julian offered another important point. Sisko nodded decisively, "We can't afford to take any chances. I want blood screenings and phaser sweeps. If he's out there, we've got to find him."
Easier said than done, Sisko thought to himself, remembering from experience hunting down changelings was not an easy task. The whole mess when Ambassador Krajensky was revealed to be a Dominion agent had to be one of the most terrifying parts of his career since they had fallen for the Dominion's lies but they luckily managed to avert a war that would have caused so much damage to the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant, they might as well have handed the quadrant over to the Dominion when they came through in force.
Sisko was silent as he thought about how they could find this latest Dominion spy; in their experience, the Changelings made the Vorta look like amateurs. This spy would not be easy to stop.
