Subject: NEW:MIS/DS9, Small Sacrifices, PG, 1/1
Title: Small Sacrifices
Author: Valerie Shearer
Contact: thenightbird@earthlink.net
Series: MIS (all series, postwar)
Part: 1/1
Rating: PG
Codes: Postwar,Borg,Changelings
Summary: An act of redemption in the postwar world that follows Odo's return to his people.
Note to Archivist: Please archive this story.
Note on Distribution: This story may be passed on to others provided this entire header is left intact and my name and e-mail address goes with each copy. It may not be published or printed for fanzines without my permission. Please ask permission to include in fanfic websites (other than the ASC archives) before doing so.
Note on Feedback: Please send lots, but be constructive. I'm especially interested in seeing if the historical segments worked with the rest. Flames will be doused, but all reasonable mail will be answered. Reply at thenightbird@earthlink.net.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. The Borg, the
Changelings, Odo, and the Vulcans are the are the Property of Paramount Studios. She is my creation.
Thanks to my beta readers, though they were fewer than usual. Thanks to Paula Stiles, Victoria Meridith, Gabrielle Lawson, and the Riverside Writers Club.
Small Sacrifices
by Valerie Shearer
The fleet of Borg cubes raced along, driven by the collective confidence of every drone. They had watched while the species and empires of the Alpha Quadrant had torn themselves apart in a vicious war. The Borg could not understand why, for such a thing would never happen to those linked in a hive mind. But they knew that the odd enemy that had defeated them twice, despite a lesser
technology and the weakness of their singular isolation, would not prevail this time. Too much had been wasted fighting each other. This time they would be assimilated. The species of the Alpha quadrant would no longer destroy each other, but come to know the peace of the hive. Their individuality would be submerged into the order of the Borg mind.
But, even with transwarp to take them most of the way it was a long journey. This time there were twenty cubes, enough to overwhelm the weakened quadrant. The hive was utterly certain of its victory. They did not take any notice of the tiny ship that swept past them nor the tiny living beasts it transported inside the thundering cubes. Both the ships and the rodents they left behind were too small to be worth notice.
***
The drones pounded past her as she scuttled into a corner, her tiny nose twitching a little as she sniffed the air. It was murky with the odors of the ship, and she was constantly retreating behind small places when she would not be squashed by the lumbering Borg. It was a daunting journey for a tiny mouse to follow the corridors and turns of the huge cube. She could
have become a cat and sped along much faster, or a bird and flown to her goal. But it mattered that she remain a mouse. She would destroy a fleet and save the solids in the form of a small, vulnerable creature they seldom gave any modicum of respect.
But she was not a mouse. She had been many things,
transforming the amber goo which made up her being into
creatures who flew and swam and walked. She had become solid, un-living things as well. But mostly she had floated on the sea of changelings, liked into a bond not unlike the artificial one the new enemy created with their implants.
But it was not the same. The Borg submerged their
individuality to the hive. She knew. She had been one for a little while. The changelings did not. They spoke with a single voice, but the voice was a chorus.
Not every drop in the ocean of changeling goo was of the same mind, but those with dissenting voices had been drowned in the din. When Odo came home, he had finally let them be heard.
Odo had set her free. He had saved his kind, but for a price. Some listened because he insisted. Some listened because they wanted to know. She had never left the link for long, never been permitted to venture out in service to her kind. She had never been allowed to free herself from the noise long enough to know what it was to be herself.
Odo had changed that. He had let her soar as an eagle, revelling in the freedom of flight. She had learned the feel of wind on her skin. She had savored the touch of a single other soul. She knew her own self now.
She did not like what her kind had done.
***
The rumbling of the cube reverberated around her, slicing through her tiny body with a tremble. Its murky darkness did not deter her. She was both changeling and mouse, retaining her mind, but also the senses of a mouse. Her twitching nose could smell what could not be seen, tangents carried on currents of air. She had materialized far enough from her goal that no alarms would be sent. It was a long journey, especially for one
so tiny, but one she must complete. It was her personal
sacrifice to right the wrongs of all her people.
Released from the noise of the others, she had gone among the solids. She had seen what the link had done, the death and ruination and tragedy. There was a debt owed, and her acts that day would begin to redeem her kind.
Odo had forced them to see. But he had kept watch on the solids as well. Those particular among the solids who had nearly destroyed the changelings were never unobserved, never to be trusted. They would not know of the sacrifice that their still hidden knowledge had set in motion. Section 31 knew of the Borg fleet that was going to destroy what the Dominion had failed to
capture. But despite desperate attempts at research, they could not stop that many cubes. They would never know the beings their disease had nearly obliterated were to save them.
It was a debt to be paid only by those willing to die.
The Borg collective would only know that something had destroyed their fleet. They would never know why.
Perhaps, it was hoped, they would not try again.
She felt the surge of acceleration as the cube picked up speed, and then briefly paused. It was growing late. She must hurry. The Borg ships must be destroyed at just the right moment, and she must be ready to trigger their end.
She would die with them, along with the nineteen others who had chosen to volunteer for the sacrifice. The others would wait, their work already done, locked into the tiny forms of mice. At her signal, their sabotage would take its toll, and the power which pulsed around the cubes would feed back upon itself, twenty times over. There would come a brilliant flash of light in the darkness of space, and in a wink nothing but debris would
remain where before a Borg fleet had been. The twenty
changelings would die with the Cubes as would all within them, but that was a price willingly paid.
As she scurried along the conduits and tiny spaces the lumbering Borg could not go, she considered the day she had been a Vulcan child and first discovered the One and the Many from an aged Master in tan robes who had changed her existence. Would he appreciate, in the secret place where the Vulcans buried their feelings, the gift he had passed on that day? In her travels she had heard the boasts of Klingons, and studied the machinations of Romulan society. She had even come to understand the service to the state expected of the Cardassians they had nearly destroyed. Every society had its version of sacrifice. But none of those things had moved her. The Klingons expected glory. The Romulans
couched the words in honor, but exploited the vulnerable. The Cardassians conditioned their people from childhood to a blind loyalty to the state.
The Vulcans asked nothing in return. It was a duty to life, for One to die rather than Many. She had been astonished by the idea, and remained on Vulcan, mostly as the Vulcan child, longer than any of the other places she had gone during her journey.
Odo had shown her the debt that was owed. The Master had given a dignity to its end she would never have known before. She was doing this for her own people, for their own salvation, but in honor of her Master too.
***
The Borg armada began to slow. She now hurried to her goal, a small conduit only something the size of a mouse could enter, and for the first and almost the last time since her arrival she changed her form. The animal was alien, unknown to any of those who would be saved. The changelings had modified them, made the small monkey-like beings into their adminestrators and researchers, programmed with blind loyalty that was a shield
against rebellion, and used them. But Odo had made them
experience the small beings they had obliterated, and appreciate what they had destroyed when they created the Vorta.
Humans would have called it a small monkey, for that is what it resembled. But it was far more intelligent. Its tiny size belied a great wisdom she needed for this moment. Working quickly, using its well honed coordination and quickness, she redesigned a circuit with the adept fingers of hands and feet leaving one trailing wire hanging from the panel, a small bulb at its end.
She was done. Soon, it would be time. The Borg had almost reached the place where they would pass into other's space, and where they would die. Honoring the creatures her own had destroyed one last time, she made the last transformation of her life.
She was again a mouse. She took the bulb in her mouth, biting it hard. A pulse sent out from every other ship told her that the other nineteen had done their work. She sat on her haunches and waited.
***
The Borg armada continued to slow as they approached the passage that marked the very edge of the Alpha quadrant. The weak beings who lived there were a mystery now, after two defeats, and the Borg exercised far more caution before passing into the new part of space.
But the area around them was normal. Long range scans showed nothing that would endanger their progress. The hive mind concentrated on looking, and would continue to search for danger until they were upon the heart of their targets.
They paid no mind to the tiny beings inside their ships. Indeed, they were so small no note was taken of them at all. One of them sat, perfectly still, her teeth clutching a small rounded bulb until it was flat.
The Hive mind made its decision. Its will was to go forward. The ships began to move very slowly.
***
The motion of the cube pulsed through her, and she
experienced a great peace. Honoring her Master, she opened her mouth.
The wire and its switch tumbled to the ground. She did not move. Inside the panel, a relay sabotaged by the hands and feet of a primitive Vorta snapped off. Other relays in other ships did the same. The circuits closed. The overwhelming power of the ships fed back upon themselves.
The heat was immense. She did not morph, as the temperature soared around her and her fur began to burn. She felt little, holding on to mouse form and taking refuge in the tiny animals deep shock until it fell, not yet lifeless, but in a haze of pain. Only then did she revert, for just a moment, before her own existence ended and turned too ash as the ships all around her began to burn.
Crumpling, the space where they had been glowed in an orange haze. The disturbance registered on remote sensors. Inside Starfleet headquarters, then in the middle of night, admirals were awakened from their sleep. Secret transmissions passed across the Alpha Quadrant. Ships were despatched.
Unknown to the solids they had saved, observers reported the success of the mission. The link felt a loss of twenty of their number, but they were not mourned. The knowledge of what they had done would be kept, but not shared with outsiders.
Light years away, the collective recorded a sudden loss of contact. Its cause was unknown. The invasion had failed. Somehow the weak beings had again prevented them. The mystery would be analyzed. But all they would find was debris. A tiny ship would fly near them. They would not even notice the small beings that were beamed to the cube. In time, the small creatures would take on the form of Borg, and the Borg would no longer be alone in their link.
The hive mind would ponder the great loss. It would never find an answer. It would never know what secret magic had devastated its ships. But it would question the wisdom of another invasion with much care, and under the influence of unknown enemies.
***
The hot, dry sands of Vulcan shimmered in the mid-day heat as the Master retreated to his private place to meditate on the universe. Something had touched him that day, something odd he could not explain, and he knew he must examine it before he could find any peace.
Entering his small, dimly lit room, he found an object that was new. It was of an odd shape, and within a tiny globe a piece of amber goo formed and reformed itself. He studied it with great curiosity, and discovered a small scratching on its encasement. Carefully written, in perfectly formed letters, it
said, "The fate of the One is made by the needs of the Many."
Not quite correct, he thought, but the essence was there.
It had not been there that morning when he left for his daily walk. No one entered this room but himself and an occasional student he honored with private meditation. None had been there today. He found no traces from known transporter systems, but knew other kinds existed belonging to those who chose to remain a mystery. It must have appeared that afternoon, when he was out in the desert and the spirit had touched him with such an
intensity that he had suddenly smelled fire all around him.
He held out his hand, the globe resting against his skin. The amber goo inside began to glow, its light reaching past the ornate case, spilling into his hand. Slowly enveloping the fingers, it flowed down his wrist in a brightness which lit the room.
And in a place where words did not exist, he knew he was no longer alone. His fingers gently closed around the object, a special warmth surrounding him, merging him with the being who had saved a little of herself to share. Closing his eyes to the brightness, he allowed her being to flow into his. For a moment they were one and he held the link until it had joined all of its living essense to him. When the last of the link had faltered and faded, he understood. A peace, intense and vivid--
the consumation of the life it represented--filled his
being.
There was a child, a Vulcan girl. She had come often for a time. The object had summoned her again, and he knew she was neither Vulcan nor a child. But her glowing hand had taken his, and the peace inside her, a gift to her Master, still filled him many hours later. He had changed her, granted her existence a meaning she had never known, and she wanted him to know the depth
of her gratitude. Deep inside his secret heart, he understood. And he mourned as well.
Much later he would learn of the band of rubble on the far edge of space, and extrapolate the rest. Now, he only knew she, the One, was gone.
the end
Valerie,
The Nightbird