Re: Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Libernobis- COMPLETE
Chapter 18
Weyoun imagined his molecules being reorganized as he solidified and the humid, warm temperatures of the Founder homeworld. They liked it rather warm, though personally he found it a touch too warm. It was humid enough, just too warm and it made him feel a little claustrophobic. He rotated a full circle before he looked over the molten sea in front of him and watched as a solitary form began to rise from the surface. The female Found approached the island where Weyoun stood. When she reached him, he didn’t bow his head in supplication, but just watched her.
“I was expecting to transport up to the ship.” Weyoun nodded at the statement.
“I thought this would be better.” It was hard to tell what she was thinking. Odo had adopted the mannerisms of solids: a blink, frown, grunt or tilt of his head, but not the female Changeling. The liar. But, she didn’t have any of those traits that made it easier to discern what she was thinking.
“And what news do you bring of Odo?” Apparently she wasn’t thinking that his behavior was odd yet. How pacified they were in feeling that they had the utter devotion of the Vorta, of him.
“Odo will not be returning to the Link. He’s decided that his place is there, among those that truly love him.” He was wrong about those mannerisms. The Changeling before him looked at Weyoun with an expression of surprise before her eyes, widened, flickered off.
A clap of thunder broke the quiet serenity of the atmosphere and Weyoun turned to the sound. The Founder homeworld was artificial and except for the island he stood on, didn’t have any land masses to speak of. There was no rain, no wind gusts, nothing that was on a normal, flourishing, M-class planet. That was why such a sound was so unnatural.
The normally bland sky was ripping open speedily as they watched. An object was breaking the atmosphere with a smooth, long streak. Fire ripped around it and Weyoun couldn’t actually see the hull of his ship piercing the atmosphere, but he knew it was.
“What’s happening?!” The harsh question made Weyoun look at the Founder, who had a few other forms solidifying near her.
“Come to enjoy the show?” He asked them softly and with a smile equally soft. Weyoun then looked back at her. “That’s my ship breaking the atmosphere of your world. You know…I hadn’t really thought about what it would look like.” Weyoun turned back to the sky above them. “But…I think it must be beautiful, in a tragic kind of way.” His voice was never above a whisper and he smiled. Weyoun looked back at the Founders standing behind the female. His smile faltered just a little.
“Don’t worry,” he knew they were. “No one is coming to help you. I’ve been a very busy little Vorta and when that ship started into the atmosphere, Vorta cloning facilities and Jem’hadar breeding and White facilities began blowing up.” Weyoun nodded and shrugged. “The Vorta will have enough White to sustain the Jem’hadar for a week, but after that…” he smiled again and actually laughed under his breath. “You wanted their loyalty and protection, drugged the animals for it, and because of that your empire is going to self destruct and leave what will be left of you defenseless. Can’t you appreciate the irony of it?”
They didn’t answer and he wasn’t surprised. He looked back at the ship. Weyoun could make out the edge now. He knew it was going down very fast, but from his perspective it wasn’t fast enough.
“Why?” The haunted question wasn’t a surprise and Weyoun looked back at the female Changeling.
“I found Kurill.” He tilted his head. “We weren’t tree dwelling. We were civilized, thriving. Stupid, but thriving. I suppose we were ripe and too tempting of a species for you.” Weyoun sighed and welcomed himself to sit on the ground. Pulling his legs up, he rested his elbows on his knees and gazed at the ship.
“We paid for our stupidity though, didn’t we? You stripped us of everything. Well,” his voice dropped again; he wasn’t even talking to them anymore. “I’m taking it back.” The metal of the ship was glowing orange now and the fire caressed parts of it that hadn’t yet slipped into the atmosphere of the planet. He could see the design of simple lines on the bottom of the ship.
Several minutes went by and Weyoun sat in complete silence with the Founders. “I loved you, you know. You made me do it. You made sure that we loved you. It wasn’t enough that you took our world, our technology and our culture, you took our choice.” Weyoun glanced down and could feel himself tremble as he thought about Mah’lel and Rahlen.
“You even took away our ability to reproduce and to experience pleasure from sights and sounds, feelings.”
Her eyes were beautiful. Their coloring was the perfect shade of violet and the shape was round, like coins.
“You made sure that you were the most beautiful, loved, worshipped things in our lives. You never even considered that the Vorta could’ve served you better if in serving you we could promote ourselves.”
The ship was closer now and he could feel the hotter temperature.
“How insecure you are as a species that you cannot negotiate or reason. You had to take a whole race of people just to do it for you.”
Movement beside him caught his eye. It was the female Changeling, and she was looking at the sky. When he felt her ‘eyes’ on him, he looked at her. “You’re going to die here too,” Her voice was strangely devoid of emotion. Weyoun shrugged.
“Somehow I always knew that when I met my final end, it would be with you.” He paused and looked at the ship, the end of everything for him. His clothes were so hot that they burned his skin and his lungs made it hurt to breathe in.
“I met a Vorta woman once, who you never took. She wasn’t touched by you.” The Vorta gasped in. His lungs were burning! “Her name was Mah’lel and she was beautiful. I think I love her now, not you.”
Hot, white light overwhelmed his vision and Weyoun winced, shutting his eyes. When he opened them again he was sitting on the consol of a Jem’Hadar ship, the same model that his ship was. Everything seemed strangely bright. It glowed and was darker than the standard level that they kept lights. How’d he get here?
Jumping off the consol, he walked around to the front of the bridge. He blinked and was surrounded by people. Sheena stood in front of him, her heart shaped face was expressionless as she stared at his own. Beside her was Laelin. Laelin’s stomach was protruding, a rounded mound in the center of her mass. The sight made him smile: the first Vorta born in a very long time.
Beside her stood Keevan and his expression was like Sheena’s, blank and intelligent. Keevan didn’t give himself enough credit. He’d be a good leader, which was why he chose Keevan. Laelin would smooth the rough edges and balance out his sense of self-preservation with her mindfulness of their people. It seemed that they’d already been working on that if the baby was any indication.
“Weyoun,” he turned to Sisko, who had appeared behind him, and raised a brow. “Weyoun has done what we needed him to.”
“Weyoun was successful.”
“He’s prevented the future”
“and saved the past.”
Turning around as they spoke, Weyoun listened to them before they all looked to the headpiece resting over the rail. Glancing at them, he picked it up and put it on. It activated without prompting and Weyoun watched a Dominion ship enter the wormhole. Immediately he knew it wasn’t normal and the ship seemed to be attacked by lightening from the chaotic walls. Quickly, it blew up and in the chaos, he could see the orb. Red bolts came from it and soon a vortex grew where the orb was. The vortex had grown to swallow up one end of the tunnel linking the two quadrants. The environment filling his eye was so chaotic and violent that seeing the motion made him sick to his stomach.
Red and blue fought. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he could see that they were. A void grew between them and Weyoun was glad that there was no sound. It looked to be howling and angry, and it only grew until Weyoun’s vision was also swallowed up in it. The screen went blank and he gently turned it up.
“That was the real orb, wasn’t it?” He didn’t get a response. “That’s what would’ve happened if the Federation had given me the real orb.” It wasn’t a question, and the red orb wasn’t from the Prophets. Again, the forms just watched him.
His viewer flickered on again and Weyoun pulled it over his eye. Laelin was in a bio-bed holding a baby. It was a girl, a baby girl with the widest, violet eyes he’d ever seen. A group of black haired, elongated eared children sat in a half circle around a Vorta adult, datapadds in each of their little hands. A Vorta Starfleet officer. Weyoun snorted a little at that one. His hair was slate grey, face marked with age as Rahlen stood in front of him with a woman, both of them were smiling at him.
Several more images shifted in front of his eye. They got faster until he had to shut his eyes against the fast and offensive changes. When he didn’t see the light behind his eye, he looked again and there he was again, in his own viewer.
Jem’hadar were at their stations while Weyoun sat in the one chair on the bridge and went over a datapadd filled with information. The shipped rocked and in a flash the Jem’hadar were gone and the bridge was darker. Weyoun was surrounded by the figures again, exactly as they were now. He demanded an explanation and like before, they waited until the Vorta understood. Weyoun picked up the headset and put it on. And, as he watched himself watch the screen, Weyoun knew what they showed him. It was Kurill Prime, when it was still beautiful and when the Vorta were still beautiful, natural and as they were meant to be. They showed him the true face of the Founders before ever knew it. His viewer flashed again and the Jem’hadar were back, dead, and he was unconscious on the floor of his shaking ship.
Silently Weyoun took the headpiece off again. This was never about the Vorta and it was all about the Prophets. He looked around at the figures that silently watched him.
“I should be angry,” Weyoun murmured and sighed. “I don’t believe in gods anymore but, even so, do you think you could spare a little benevolence for my people?”
They didn’t answer and Weyoun winced. His skin hurt, his face and even the hair follicles on his head. A sound came from him and he touched his chest. He couldn’t breathe at all. Despite those sensations, he smiled.
Right there behind his eyes, Mah’lel was there with Rahlen. They were playing in the park and it was so green. Rahlen laughed—squealed, and Mah’lel laughed at him.
They were beautiful, and they were the last things he saw before the white light overwhelmed his senses once again.
~fin
End Notes: Thank you a thousand times over for reading. Those of you that have been here from the beginning know how long it has taken, but it's done! There are some questions that have come up during the course of this, and I’ll strive to answer them all here.
‘Libernobis’ was derived from ‘liber’ meaning ‘free’ and ‘nobis’, which means ‘us’. That is, according to my handy online translator. I don’t speak Latin!
Yes, she was a colonel and no, I didn’t intentionally demote her. I was just lucky enough to be able to fix it in the story though.
I’m not really a huge Bajoran fan (I’m not against them, I’m just more of a Vorta/Cardassian girl) so I don’t know if that’s exactly how the Prophets work. But, they are gods and can make whole ships disappear, so do we really know their limits?
I WAS planning for Vorak and Lesedi to be more active! It didn’t work out that way, though I got a feeling you haven’t heard the end of them, if I write more in the Libernobis universe.
Lesedi didn’t leave Vorak’s side because, well…opposites attract. If I had had the time to do the ‘shorts’ that I planned, we would’ve seen them develop more.
Vorak will recover. The disciplined mind did screw him over, but he’ll recover.
I planned on this story being more steamy than it was, actually! I’m not sure that it really earns its rating.
I’m planning a prequel taking place on Kurill Prime, but I’d like to do a post-Libernobis role play that takes place on the Vorta colony. If you’re interested, please let me know. If enough people would like to, I think it’d be fun, and you don’t really have to read the story.