He looked down at his left leg again, and thought of his absent friends.

Then he smiled. So be it.

The sound of his own pulse nearly drowning out the rising din of the approaching Jem’Hadar, Nog planted his feet in the dust and raised his phaser toward his still-concealed pursuers.

“Sorry, Uncle,” he said out loud, his voice sounding flat in the stale, stagnant air. “It looks like my running days are over. In more ways than one.”

Another Jem’Hadar appeared from behind the same outcropping that had produced the first. A second and a third followed hard on his heels. Nog fired and fired again. Three times. Five times. Still more Jem’Hadar filed into view from behind the rocks, moving closer, contemptuous of the death Nog dispensed. Corpses fell in twisted heaps, and still more Jem’Hadar leaped over them, approaching faster than Nog could kill them. The press of hostile flesh was now only a few meters away, and every soldier in the line wore the same face.

The face of the first Jem’Hadar to fall.

Taran’atar’s face.

Nog continued firing. But they kept coming, surrounding him, every countenance overflowing with the brute savagery he’d always known lay just beneath Taran’atar’s veneer of civility.

The phaser in his hand suddenly stopped firing. Out of power. Great.

To Nog’s astonishment, the columns of Jem’Hadar abruptly halted their advance. Except for the cacophonous strains of distant music, utter silence engulfed the world.

A lone, black-clad Jem’Hadar soldier stepped forward, continuing his deliberate approach until he stood within arm’s reach. The creature towered forbiddingly over Nog, who felt his guts turn to parboiled gree worms. He concentrated on the barely audible music in an effort to master his fear. He wished fervently that Captain Sisko had agreed to sponsor his application to Starfleet Academy more than four years ago. If that had happened, then he’d know how to handle himself now.

Confused, overlapping memories assailed him. Sisko hadsponsored him. He’d made it into the Academy. He’d served in a cadet unit called Omega Squadron, under the grandson of a famous Starfleet commodore. By graduation he’d already visited and seen more strange places than he could count, from Cardassia Prime to Talos IV. Perhaps more than any other Ferengi that had ever lived.

Then Nog recognized the ethereal sounds that were drifting across the dismal landscape: He’d first heard them aboard the Sagan,just before the artifact had first appeared. Its entwining, random-numerical melodies reminded him of the physical unreality of this place and helped him to suppress his overpowering urge to flee. And its steady pulse reminded him that the clock was still ticking inevitably toward the interdimensional “untethering” that Sacagawea had described—and which he had already previewed aboard the Defianton more than one occasion.

Somehow, Nog managed to hold his ground. When he spoke, his voice shook. “All right, Taran’atar. Get on with it.”

Then, to Nog’s immense surprise, an unexpected equanimity descended upon him. Right after they’d discovered the artifact, Ezri had tried to tell him that he needed to clear the air between himself and Taran’atar. He wondered if that’s what he was about to do, consciously or not. Maybe it explained why the artifact had recreated AR-558’s killing ground.

Taran’atar took a step back, raised his bloodied kar’takin,and swung the blade into Nog’s left leg, just below the knee. Whether real or imaginary, the pain utterly convinced Nog. He collapsed to the dust, screaming.

As though disconnected from his own body, Nog watched as Taran’atar reached down and picked up the severed leg as though it were some hard-won battle trophy. The Jem’Hadar smiled enigmatically as he tucked the limb behind his back, along with his gore-spattered blade. Then he tossed a small metallic object into the dust beside Nog.

Nog saw that it was a Starfleet combadge. He picked it up. He felt light-headed, unable to speak, conscious of little besides his own blood, which was rapidly soaking the desiccated ground. With trembling fingers, he activated the little device’s homing beacon, uncertain as to whether it could reach the Defiant.Or if it was working, or if it was even real.

The world turned sideways, the way it had the time he’d unwisely tried to match Vic Fontaine’s drummer drink for drink. “I’ll be seeing you,” he thought he heard Taran’atar say in an incongruously clear tenor voice, “in all the old familiar places.”

And just before consciousness fled him, Nog realized that he could probably deal with that.

All at once, Dax became aware that something in its environment had changed. The blind and deaf creature was well acquainted with the curious tingling sensation of being disassembled and reconstituted by a transporter beam—even harrowing, rather rough beamings such as the one it had just experienced. But this current feeling of sudden change was subtly different.

Dax still enjoyed the same euphoric freedom of gentle, aqueous suspension it had been experiencing for the past day or so, ever since its abrupt removal from Ezri Tigan’s body. What was different and perplexing waswhere the symbiont now found itself floating. It made no sense, but there could be no denying the water’s distinctive salinity and mineral factors. Even the limited sensorium of a symbiont could never mistake this particular place for any other.

Mak’ala. Somehow, I have been brought home, all the way from the hinterlands of the Gamma Quadrant.

With that recognition came an ominous tingle of dread. Dax had never enjoyed spending extended periods here. The symbiont had always taken great care to prearrange as brief a recuperation interval here as possible while between hosts. Floating in the complex network of caves for too long had always brought on a curious, and admittedly irrational, feeling of vulnerability.

After returning to the pools briefly following the death of Lela, the first Dax host, the symbiont had dreamed of predators—eyeless creatures who trolled the caves until their hyperolfactory abilities guided them unerringly to some unsuspecting symbiont. Then these inescapable horrors of unhinged jaws and serrated teeth would pounce. Scores of lifetimes would end, suddenly and ignominiously, in some brute’s foul gullet—

Stop it, Dax told itself. Such things did not exist. The humanoid Trills who tended the pools had seen to that long ago.

Yet the apprehension lingered.

Dax wished there had been an opportunity to arrange a new joining before being disassociated from Ezri Tigan. But the separation had come without any warning. How long would the Symbiosis Commission take to assign a new host? Not long, Dax trusted. The Commission knew that Dax’s lifetimes of experience were too valuable to the Federation to be allowed to languish for long.

Dax wished Ezri well. It had no desire to see her come to harm because of the sudden collapse of their joining. And it appreciated all the painstaking, after-the-fact preparation Ezri had done to accommodate theirad hoc symbiosis, once it had become a necessary and unalterablefait accompli. But the encounter with the alien artifact had caused that symbiosis to fail, or had at least catalyzed its failure. That aborted joining was now part of Dax’s lengthy past, and was likely to remain so. And although it shamed Dax to admit it, being free of Ezri’s sometimes disorderly thought processes was a real relief. The portion of Dax that recalled Audrid’s love of peaceful walks in the woods exulted in this newfound freedom.

Dax reached out into its liquid environment with its limited physical senses, probing around itself with insubstantial electrolyte filaments. It perceived immediately that other symbionts were in the pool, which was as expected. Willing itself forward, Dax probed to the pool’s boundaries, sensed the limits of its rocky walls in every direction. It was a finite, though by no means cramped, space. But Dax knew that this would be the extent of its universe until its next joining. The wider, less confining worlds beyond were far more inviting.