Damn! She’s onto us, Reese thought, feeling the sweat pooling in the small of his back. He remained motionless.

  “I said back away,” repeated the colonel, who was now drawing her weapon. Reese turned his head and saw that Odo and the armed personnel were now eyeing both Reese and Ekoor with evident suspicion.

  Judging from the garbled sounds he could hear through his mask whenever either he or Ekoor spoke, Reese knew that the vocoders that altered their speech—and that completed their disguises as enigmatic Breen soldiers—were still working. And if their scan-shielded disruptor weapons been detected, surely an alarm would have sounded, either here in the security area or back in the wardroom during the armistice signing ceremony.

  Reese wondered whether either he or Ekoor had somehow raised the colonel’s suspicions with a stray movement or gesture. Or maybe Kira had discovered that Ekoor had taken the coolsuits from the crate he had brought aboard Defiant.

  He decided it was pointless to speculate and willed himself to relax. As far as anyone can tell, we’re both exactly what we appear to be.

  Ekoor, however, chose that moment to pull his own weapon from a thigh-flap. Rolling onto the floor, he fired at Kira, who was already in motion, as was Odo. Acting on instinct, Reese threw himself to the floor as an alarm klaxon sounded; he knocked over a Bajoran deputy and a Starfleet security guard even as Kira returned Ekoor’s fire.

  Rolling swiftly onto his side, Reese pulled his own weapon and shot out the keypad that controlled the security forcefield, which abruptly crackled out of existence. Ignoring the firefight that raged around him, he immediately somersaulted into the Founder’s cell and came up in a crouch directly behind where she sat, impassively watching the brief battle. If Kira or any of the others were to open fire on him now, they’d have to go right through the shapeshifter to hit him.

  Of course, Reese couldn’t help wondering whether anyone other than Odo would have had much of a problem with that.

  “Hold your fire!” Odo and Kira shouted, almost in unison. Except for the wail of a security alarm, silence descended over the small cell block.

  When Reese placed the barrel of his disruptor against the changeling’s puttylike temple, she made no move to resist him. She simply continued sitting. Rather than showing fear, her expression revealed an attitude of quiet contemplation.

  Then Reese heard a deep, familiar voice coming from outside the cell. “We’ve got your accomplice. You might as well give up and drop your weapon.”

  “I don’t want to be here,” Sisko said.

  One of the wormhole aliens now wore the form of Jennifer, and was dressed in the same fetching two-piece bathing suit she had worn on the day they had met, so many years ago. Still standing in what appeared to be the Saratoga’s burning corridor, Sisko was taken aback.

  “Then why do you exist here?” the Jennifer-alien asked, her face a study in earnest perplexity.

  Sisko, too, was at a loss. “I don’t understand.”

  The confusion of the Jennifer-alien seemed only to escalate. “You exist here.”

  Sisko entered the security area at a run. The alarm signaling the unauthorized discharge of a weapon sounded just as he bounded across the threshold.

  One of the Breen guards, a disruptor in his hand, was caught in a cross fire laid down by Kira, two Bajoran deputies, and a Starfleet security guard. The Breen soldier dropped slackly to the deck, landing near a second Starfleet security officer who had evidently been knocked off his feet during the melee, his shoulder scorched where he’d been grazed by a Breen disruptor blast.

  Inside the holding cell that lay beyond sat the Founder. Her remaining Breen guard held a disruptor pistol to her head.

  Sisko arrived at the unconscious Breen soldier’s side just in time to see Kira kneel beside him and remove his mask and helmet. The flashing green lights of the visor went dark as she dropped the helmet and face-covering to the deck.

  As Sisko had suspected during the armistice signing, the Breen under the headgear was no Breen at all.

  The face beneath the visor belonged to Glinn Ekoor.

  Of course, Sisko thought, confirming his growing belief that Ekoor must have planned from the beginning to use the Dominion artifacts he had brought from Cardassia to avenge that world’s slain millions.

  Sisko walked toward the threshold of the holding cell, whose force field, he noted, wasn’t working. The keypad beside the cell door was a charred ruin. There was nothing to prevent the person with the disruptor from opening fire either on Sisko or on the others who stood in the security area.

  But that also meant that phasers could be fired into the cell.

  “We’ve got your accomplice,” Sisko said to the figure holding the disruptor. “You might as well give up and drop your weapon.”

  “Captain,” Odo said, holding up a flat, palm-sized device for Sisko’s inspection. “Glinn Ekoor was carrying this—his escape route, apparently.”

  Sisko took the item and turned it over in his hands, studying it carefully. He recognized it as the control padd of a Dominion site-to-site transporter. A few months ago a group of Pah-wraith cultists led by Gul Dukat had used just such a device to abduct Colonel Kira, bringing her across a distance of three light-years to the derelict Cardassian space station Empok Nor.

  Lifting the device so that the helmeted man with the disruptor could see it easily, Sisko said, “I suppose if you were carrying one of these as well, you’d already have done your dirty work and beamed yourself out of here.” He noted that the Bajoran deputies and Starfleet security personnel alike all had their weapons trained on the second faux Breen, whose green visor lights now moved from side to side in a way that suggested to Sisko either fear or rage, or perhaps both.

  Whoever this individual really was, he was clearly cornered. And therefore doubly dangerous, Sisko told himself as he handed the transporter control back to Odo.

  Sisko remembered the phaser that hung at his hip, and momentarily considered drawing it. For a brief interval, his own war-weariness—a cumulative revulsion for the unending pageant of death and horror to which the Dominion and its allies had subjected him over the past two years—threatened to overwhelm him. How easy it would be to simply pull his weapon, fire it, and end the standoff by taking down both gunman and hostage at once. After all, the Founder was a brutal war criminal. Hundreds of millions of deaths could be laid at her feet.

  No. This damned war has taken enough lives.

  But the anger remained incandescent within Sisko’s heart, reminding him of the day, now seven years gone, when he had first come aboard DS9 as its new commander. Back then, the Prophets had yet to reveal how his destiny and that of Bajor intertwined. And this god-forsaken, half-gutted Cardassian ore-processing station was the last place in the galaxy he had wanted to be. He never would have considered raising his son in such a hellhole. In fact, he had quickly—if temporarily—decided to resign his commission before doing such a thing to Jake, who was all that remained of his beloved Jennifer. Her death during the Borg battle at Wolf 359, then less than three years in the past, had still been an open wound in those days.

  Sisko had never felt such a primal, atavistic desire to destroy another sentient creature as he had on his first day on the station. He had come aboard the visiting U.S.S. Enterprise that day, and found himself standing in the presence of Captain Jean-Luc Picard—the man who had, at the very least, presided over the deaths of Jennifer and so many other good people at Wolf 359.

  Locutus of Borg.

  “Have we met before?” Picard asked him.

  Sisko’s response was hard, each word a lethal projectile. “Yes, sir. We met in battle. I was on the Saratoga. At Wolf 359.”

  From beside Sisko, Odo addressed the Founder. “You don’t have to sit there and just let him kill you.”

  She smiled, her expression as serene as ever, her voice tranquil. “Perhaps I do, Odo.”

  “It isn’t right,” Odo said. “This isn’t the way the things are supposed to be done here.”

  “There are always exceptions to the they way things are supposed to be done, Odo.” Her tone was casual, as though she were discussing the weather on her homeworld. “Like the introduction of the viral disease that has nearly destroyed the Great Link and all of our people.”

  Odo shook his head. “That wasn’t sanctioned by the Federation. You know that. It was the work of rogue elements.”

  “Indeed. As are the actions of these men.” She nodded toward the weapon that stood ready to blow her head apart.

  Odo took a step forward.

  The “Breen” spoke sharply, obviously issuing a challenge, though all Sisko heard was a series of unintelligible, electronically altered sounds. Odo froze in his tracks. The disruptor remained pointed at the female Founder’s head, and she still made no move to protect herself.

  “Do not endanger yourself on my behalf, Odo,” she said. “You must survive. You must bring the cure for the illness back to our people. And you must assure them of the Federation’s peaceful intentions. My own death is inconsequential. And perhaps it is even just.”

  “I’d prefer to let a formal war crimes tribunal determine what’s just,” Sisko said.

  That thought brought him to a chilling realization: When Odo returned to the Founder homeworld and linked with his people, they would learn everything that had happened here. Odo’s species was already predisposed to aggression and paranoia by millennia of conflict with non-shapeshifting “solids.”

  How would they react to the cold-blooded execution of their supreme military commander?

  “Why not take off the mask?” Sisko said to the gunman, hoping that his evolving suspicion about the “Breen’s” real identity was wrong. “There’s no point in trying to pass yourself off as a Breen soldier any longer. One way or another, this is over.”

  After a lengthy pause, during which the “Breen” apparently considered the five weapons that were trained on him from outside the cell, the gunman opened the catches on his helmet and mask. Without allowing his disruptor to waver for an instant, he used one hand to doff his head coverings and let them fall to the deck.

  An intense feeling of disappointment and anger seized Sisko when he saw the face beneath the mask.

  “Don’t try to stop me, Captain,” Reese said, now sweating profusely into the stifling Breen uniform. He knew that decision time had arrived. And that no matter what he decided, he wasn’t going to get out of this alive.

  Billy’s dead, vacant eyes still haunted him. Spurred him. Inspired him.

  “I trusted you, Mr. Reese,” Sisko said, glowering dangerously as he stepped toward the threshold of the holding cell.

  Reese dug the disruptor’s barrel into the Founder’s ductile skin. “Don’t. Come. Any. Closer.” Even in his own ears, his voice sounded brittle, dangerous, an emotional rockslide liable to be triggered by even the gentlest of shocks.

  Sisko stopped, his gaze intense and angry, his stance aggressive. Reese wondered if the captain was going to charge him, disruptor or no disruptor.

  Then, surprisingly, Sisko’s features slackened, taking on a more thoughtful cast. His body relaxed visibly. “I was like you once, Mr. Reese,” he said, his voice low, his emotions unguessable.

  Reese chuckled, prompting him to wonder if he really was finally beginning to crack. “I doubt that, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Did you ever spend five months in hell—trying to hold onto a little piece of dirt there—while the Jem’Hadar kept sending everything they had against you?”

  “I was there,” Sisko said. “At least for the end of it.”

  Reese’s finger tightened on the trigger. He snorted, and said, “And you would have died there if not for me. I saved your life.”

  “I know that,” Sisko said, nodding slowly. “Now I’m trying to return the favor.”

  “Too late,” Reese said. He heard braying, disturbing laughter. His own, he realized belatedly. “It’s too late to change my mind about this.”

  “No, it’s not.” Sisko turned and pointed toward the insensate body of Ekoor, which lay partially within Reese’s line of sight. “We change our minds all the time. Old enemies can become partners, under the right circumstances. Maybe even friends.”

  “Ekoor and I aren’t friends. I just happen to want to see this monster dead as much as he does.”

  “Because you spent five months in hell,” Sisko said. The captain’s acerbic tone suddenly reminded Reese of one of his Academy drill instructors, an angry, red-faced man whose favorite disparagement had been “whiner!”

  The unwelcome memory raised both his hackles and his ire. “With all due respect, sir,” Reese snarled, “I’m used to drawing jobs that are a lot less cushy than yours.”

  “Let me tell you something, Mister,” Sisko said, his eyes narrowing, his tone once again as deep and dangerous as an ocean rip tide. “I’ve seen more hell than you can ever imagine, courtesy of the Borg collective.”

  Reese’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t heard that Sisko had faced the Borg in battle. But he did know that the chances of surviving an encounter with those Delta Quadrant cyborgs were pretty slim.

  “The Borg killed my wife, Mr. Reese,” Sisko continued implacably. “Along with about eleven thousand other people. The collective destroyed thirty-nine starships that day—and their attack was directed by a fellow Starfleet officer.”

  Reese closed his eyes. Billy’s sightless gaze awaited him in the darkness, as it did more and more frequently these days. His eyes were empty.

  “A couple of years later, I came face to face with the same man again,” Sisko continued. “He’d recovered from what the Borg had done to him. But I hadn’t yet.”

  Reese blinked as sweat rolled down his forehead and obscured his vision. The memory of Billy’s dead stare persisted behind his eyes, as though burned onto his retinas by an exploding houdini mine.

  Reese opened his eyes. Sisko had resumed moving forward, crossing the threshold of the holding cell. He was now just two meters away. The captain would be splattered with the Founder’s body fluids if Reese fired the disruptor. When he fired the disruptor.

  “I wanted to kill him, Reese. I actually thought about killing him. And I actually could have killed him. It probably wouldn’t have been much harder than firing that weapon you’re holding right now.”

  Reese noticed that his gun hand was shaking involuntarily. He found that he was powerless to stop it.

  “What did you do?” he said, his voice a hoarse croak. It sounded as though it was coming from someone else, someone standing between him and the Founder.

  “I backed away from the precipice. You can, too.”

  Reese shook his head. It’s too late. Too late for me. For Ekoor. For Vargas, and Kellin, and Loomis, and Parker.

  For Billy.

  “This monster’s got to die for what she’s done,” Reese said, somehow maintaining his grip on the quivering disruptor. The Founder still refused to move, or to defend herself. “There’s nothing you can say that will stop me.”

  Sisko came to a stop less than a meter away from the shapeshifter, who was gazing up at him from her bunk, her expression attentive and curious.

  “You’re right,” Sisko said. “Though I can tell you that killing this changeling won’t bring back whoever you’ve lost in the war. But you already knew that. Didn’t you?”

  Billy.

  “Whoever you’re trying to avenge,” Sisko said, “would they want this? Would they want you to leap into the abyss? Or would they want you to live a life they could be proud of? If you throw that life away now, you’ll demean the deaths of so many others.

  “Is that what you want, Mr. Reese?”

  Reese closed his eyes again. As always, Billy awaited him in a foul midden of memory and death. And just as in the past few weeks—a time filled with dreams of ever-escalating horror—his eyes were desolate, bereft of life.

  But this time, the darkness within them accused him.

  Reese felt his quaking hand suddenly go slack. The weapon slid from his nerveless fingers and into Sisko’s outstretched hand.

  After tossing Reese’s disruptor aside, Sisko caught the younger man when he sagged toward the deck. Sisko guided him to a corner, where Reese sat, staring at nothing. Kira and Odo rushed into the cell, followed by the deputies and security guards.

  Odo hastened to the Founder’s side to make sure she hadn’t been harmed. “Solids,” she said simply, evidently none the worse for wear. Still seated on the edge of the bunk as though nothing of significance had happened, she looked over at Sisko. “You are so very contradictory. Humans, I mean.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Sisko said as Kira summoned medical help for Reese, Ekoor, and the Starfleet security guard who had been grazed by the Cardassian’s disruptor. “Fortunately, we’re able to overcome our worst impulses.”

  “At times,” the Founder said.

  A wry smile came to Sisko’s lips. “Usually when it counts the most. Maybe we can’t change our shapes, but we can change our hearts.” Sisko paused, again wondering what the Great Link would make of her experience here today. Would the changelings find their ingrained suspicions justified? Or would they see Reese’s decision not to commit murder as a reason for hope?

  “Your people are no different,” Sisko continued. “I think you proved that by giving up the fight.”

  “Let us hope that you’re right,” the Founder said. “About both our species.”

  After the deputies had conducted the Founder to an adjacent cell—one with a functioning force field—Sisko, Odo, and Kira stood together in companionable silence in the center of the security area. They watched as Dr. Bashir and a pair of medics arrived and gently placed Ekoor’s unconscious form onto an antigrav stretcher. Once that was done, Bashir and one of the medics helped Reese to his feet. Joined by a Starfleet security guard, the group conducted the two broken soldiers out of the security area and toward the infirmary.