"The Denouncement"

The visage of the Orion vessel’s commander filled the viewscreen, and it was apparent to all that she was very, very happy.

"Ha-ha!" She laughed, pointing at the viewscreen, and subsequently all of those gathered in the command center. "I told you you kept your guard down too often!" She grinned from ear to ear and leaned in close to the visual receptors, whispering, "I was close enough to cut the lobes off of your ears before you would even have known it."

The dark skinned and shiningly bald commander of the station newly annexed for the Terran Empire watched the woman calmly, disallowing his face to reveal any emotion. His eyes followed her dusky countenance as she leaned back to sit in her chair. "You didn’t have to fire on us," came his rich voice, sounding only faintly hurt.

Ezri Dax looked toward him, "No damage taken, little boy," she grinned.

Benjamin Sisko shot her a glance that would have frozen the quantum singularity at the heart of a Romulan warbird. "I do not recall asking you to speak," he said.

Ezri looked hurt, and even perhaps a little horrified when Sisko’s face broke into a grin. "I was kidding."

He cocked his head to one side, as if fully seeing the woman known as Ezri Dax for the first time. "So was I," he explained, striding across the bridge and kneeling over the woman who had made, only a few moments before, a sudden appearance aboard his station. He looked closely at her face, then used the fingertips of his right hand to lightly brush the hair away from the place her sideburns would be. "Does this woman look familiar to you," he asked Dax.

Bashir moved closer to the woman unholstering his medical tricorder once more.

"Catherine Chandler, right," Bashir asked. He studied his readouts, heedless of the fact that Sisko and Dax’s gazes were locked into his activity to see what was coming. Dax was rounding the console she normally manned and moving toward the three gathered near the transport pad. She sped up half a pace as Bashir’s face twisted, his brows knitting sharply in the center of his forehead. "Wrong," he breathed.

Benjamin pointed at the unconscious woman’s face. "I know," he gestured, two fingers indicating the side of her face. "Those are --"

Ezri Dax’ view of the woman had been obscured due to the two figures stooped over the out-cold-form, but was revealed as she stepped around Sisko. "Trill melaninnic stigmata," she said.

Bashir nodded. "According to my tricorder," he told her, "this woman is Trill."

Benjamin looked to her, "Like you," Sisko asked.

"Can’t be," she breathed. The rest of the Trill are dead.

A transporter beam coalesced on the pad. As the form stabilized into Captain Kassidy Sisko, her husband rose from his kneeling position.

"Were you going to give me permission to dock," she said plainly, aiming an energy discharge weapon at the commander. "Or let us sit and rot out there while you paw all over this female, prone on the floor."

As Benjamin looked ready to continue speaking; to explain himself, she cut him off. "I know how much the three of you like to paw all over strange prone women," she said, pointedly staring at Dax. Her eyes nearly imperceptibly flicked form the woman on the floor to Dax, to the woman, and held back on the young newly joined Trill with the close cropped dark hair.

Sisko relaxed, swaggering toward his wife comfortably. "You should know."

"I’m uh, going to get her down to the torture chamber -- medical -- uh, whatever," he told Sisko.

Both Sisko’s lazily brushed him off and immediately tore into a lip-locked embrace that would have have satiated the desires bottled up by six of the same individuals from the universe Damson Rhee had been born in.

In the turbolift, Bashir slumped to the deck, felled by the agonizer placed in close proximity to his basal ganglia by the deft handiwork of one Ezri Dax.

"You can’t stay here," Dax told the woman. "This is my place. My world. My universe," she said, sliding a scalpel from Bashir’s ample supply of ‘medical’ devices he carried at all times.

Rhee’s eyes shot open, grabbed the younger host by the meat of the shoulder with one hand, and rolled toward the opposite side of her own body. She let the host down easy, aware that the symbiont would still be awake and cognizant. "Dax," she said. "I knew you in another universe where you loved the rest of us. You must have forgotten." She rolled the other woman over and lay on top of her, belly to belly, allowing rare, direct communication from host to host. She spoke only for a few moments, but passed on a lifetime of new ideas and concepts and most of all, ideals, to the mirror Dax symbiont.

So engrossed in the conversation was she, that she failed to notice Ezri’s eyes flicker open. "Ah," Ezri Dax breathed zealously, "I knew you cared,." She wrapped her arms around Rhee’s body and took the woman’s mouth in hers. Rhee, startled by the gesture, tried to gasp, but found herself locked into a passionate kiss with Ezri Dax.

She fought for a moment, then realized that this was not the Ezri Dax she had used the Vulcan nerve pinch on, but a newer, kinder, gentler Ezri Dax. She held the mirror Trill’s obscuration for a few more moments, breathing in the deep, passionate longing of it. Her eyes widened as a realization came to her. She was unsure of whether it was from the symbionts or from some sort of link the hosts had spontaneously formed between one another.

"It’s that easy," she said, breaking the kiss and embrace.

"Sure," Ezri Dax told her.

Rhee smiled unassuredly and turned to one side, presenting her profile to Dax. Ezri nodded, so she closed her eyes, keeping one surreptitiously opened, focused on the woman’s hands.

"Well," she heard Ezri say.

"Go ahead." Ezri watched as Damson Rhee clicked her hells three times, chanting.

"There’s no place like home," Rhee repeated solemnly, watching the other Trill fiddle with a control apparently implanted into her leg.

Benjamin Sisko looked up, sweat dripping from his head and body, to see a faint yellow shimmering hover above the air of the transporter pad. He continued to thrust, but his mind had been half taken away by the spectacle he thought he had seen. He inclined his head a bit, shook it, and looked back down to his wife’s face, twisted in intense pleasure.

"I think," he gasped. "I’m headed for -- a -- warp -- core ---"

Breach imminent in two minutes, Damson Rhee heard as she materialized in the aft section of the spinning shuttlecraft. "Computer," the Doctor called. Shut down all systems including life support authorization Rhee six one five nine Scorpio November sixty labium forty!"

The shuttle immediately ceased spinning, and the stars ceased their dizzyingly rapid trace across the viewscreen. Rhee rushed to the commpanel, tapping the Victory Chief Science Officer’s shoulder in a light awakening. "Doctor Damson Rhee aboard shuttlecraft Garrett from the USS Victory," she called.

"Where in the world did you come from," Colonel Kira’s voice retorted. "You didn’t even register on my sensors and then suddenly --"

Rhee smiled. "We used a propulsion system of my own design," she explained. "As for arriving early . . . " The Doctor intentionally trailed off.

Kira Nerys was rarely so obviously puzzled as when she responded, "How did you know I was about to comment on your schedule," she asked, her image finally flicking onto the viewscreen, replacing the station schematic.

"It’s a short story," Rhee said. "To make it even more succinct," she smiled, "It’s what Benjamin would have said."

"You knew Captain Sisko," Kira deadpanned. "Why did everyone know Captain dammit Sisko," she said, catching herself not quite in time to remember the Attainder that had already been placed on her once. Blaspheming the name of The Emissary probably wouldn’t help.

Rhee gained permission to dock, and moments later, as the airlocks began to cycle between the station and the shuttle, she plugged of a salute to the Victory’s Science Officer, and tapped her commbadge.

"Doctor Damson Rhee to Lieutenant Ezri Dax," she said, concluding her journey to Deep Space Nine.