Chapter One - Allow Me To Introduce Myself.....

2372, Alpha Quadrant, Unoccupied Space past the Bajoran/Cardassian/Klingon borders

Aboard the small jump-ship, she caressed the cheek of her prize. Let the humans mourn Picard's passing. Let them celebrate Kirk's return, and his new command. For it was all irrelevant. Locutus would soon be theirs again. He would soon--be hers again.

One couldn't interfere with the circuitry on a Borg jump-ship, for the ship was all assembled circuitry, with only psionic will providing structure and integrity. The circuitry exposed to the chill of space thrived on low temperatures. The circuitry inside thrived on humidity, such as was caused by living bodies within excrecable proximity to one another. The circuitry in the middle of course thrived on shifting temperatures. Such was perfection.

On the pursuing ships, no one caressed anyone for any reason, and this was the will of the gods. Some had no use for such things. Some few had no concept of why one would want to do so. They none of them wanted a single thing except to carry out the orders they had been given from the forces of creation themselves.

As D'Har Master Kor would one day show, a group of stinging Jem'Hadar warcrafts could be brought low and destroyed, one and all to the last occupant. But you couldn't hope to survive such an endeavor, whatever your success rate. The Jem'Hadar protected no resources, save what the Founders directed. The Vorta would see openings in battle created by targeting hospital ships, and they would exploit them without stop, let, or inconvenient consciences. Such was devotion.

The message was sent by the lead Vorta, ninth of the Tubin line. Less soft, less diplomatic. More statement, less wordage. That was for the Weyoun line, although Tubin-9 often thought of asking that his own line's skills be cross-pollinated. All that useless wordage was hard to precisely fashion, and the challenge intrigued him in that way. His ridges were high, and good for dealing with Klingons, Romulans, and others whose heads were somehow made larger than most bipedals. Cybernetics came to mind. As they were in his mind now.

"Borg craft. We believe you to contain both the essence of your central leader or equivalent entity as well as the inert body of the deceased human, Jean-Luc Picard.
We of the Dominion who serve the blessed Founders bid you stop for a period of one standard day."

The reply was standard, culled from databases myriad and masterful, all driven to cybernetic meal by the very nature of the expansionist, rapacious Borg.

"Who we contain is irrelevant. The Dominion is irrelevant. We shall pass, and you shall offer no resistance."

Beams and projectiles lashed out from the Dominion ships. The Borg jump-ship rocked. Tubin-9 tried again.

"You possess the ability to adapt to our weaponry, and to go past our shields. But it will take you almost three standard days to destroy us. We ask that your journey home be delayed by only one. Surely, keeping to a timetable is a relevant concern?"

The message had been sent via compacted carrier-waves, filtered through local sunspot activity, and was meant to be received on the Borg's anomaly scanner.
The message was received via a quantanery program meant to read any messages hidden in the anomaly scanning program. It was refiltered through the ship's deflector array. It was replied to in the manner and method in which it was originally sent. It was an odd gesture of what some might call respect.

"We choose the shorter delay. To what purpose is this interdiction?"

Tubin-9 smiled, slightly. Not all Vortas were wholly joyless.

"Interdiction is, shall we say, irrelevant. We don't desire to end your journey. We will direct you to a planet in this region in our possession. There, your --central force-- will meet with ours. At the end of one standard day, and not before, we will cease our interference and you will be on your way."

He was good at using the language of those he dealt with to get what he wanted-- what the Founders wanted. Tubin waited. He didn't wait long.

"The agreement is acceptable. Attempt no deviation."

"There will be no deviation. There will be a signal to mark the place of meeting. There will be no further transmissions. Dominion out."

The Jem'Hadar First spoke up.

"No further transmissions? I don't like words, Vorta. But further transmissions could, in theory, become necessary."

Tubin actually nodded.

"Yes, they could. But you see, First, for the Dominion, and for the Federation, the phrase 'no further transmissions' is something we come to expect to hear. But for Klingons, Romulans, and Borg---its a vexing thing to hear someone else say. Do you know how often those three powers use that phrase? It makes even we Vortas squeamish."

The First nodded.

"Warfare by alternate means, then?"

Tubin turned back to his work, should the Borg try something.

"Isn't it always?"
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The desolate place had no name. The Federation had never wanted it, even as a dilithium cracking station. The Klingons actually thought it too harsh in a bland sort of way to be useful for training young warriors. The Romulans saw no use for a secret base so hard to defend. Bajoran and later Cardassian and still later Ferengi traders never left their goods there, for fear of just forgetting this pointless little spot. As a young warrior in a fantasy had once so aptly put it, if there was a bright center to the universe, this place was about as far from it as one got.

In short, it was an ideal meeting place for two ill winds that blew no good.

Circuitry from the Borg ship arrived in a pod, along with some DNA fragments. The DNA became bits of flesh, and around that meager flesh she assembled herself, luxuriating in the act and art of regeneration. She touched her own body, and even her hand against her forehead made her tremble with glee.

A nearby boulder moved without movement, and she formed, exactly as she wished to be seen, when dealing with Solids, or those, like Odo, who had been corrupted by them. She felt alone. She felt apart. She felt resolute. In her apartness, she would gain for her kind the one true security, no matter her own desperation to be whole again.

"I am the spark which forms the lightning. I am one drop of the ocean, and I am the ocean itself. I am The Founders, and the Founders are The Dominion. We gather strength unto ourselves, to seek the goal of a universe cleansed of all disorder."

"I Am The Borg. We seek perfection. How it is achieved is irrelevant. If by imposing order, the answer to perfection is found, then we will impose such order. If by seeding chaos, we cause that answer to be tossed up or found by a warring army, so be it. Perfection is all."

For a solid hour, there was silence between the leaders who would gladly spend large volumes of time explaining why they really weren't their groups' leaders. While silence can have many meanings, the simultaneous words spoken by both to break that silence told much of the path this meeting would take.

"You will stay out of our affairs."

Chapter Two - Pleased To Meet You

The Borg Queen adopted that quiet/unquiet smile/nonsmile that very few knew and even fewer escaped to tell of. It bespoke full satisfaction in her own position, place, and power, although power was of course irrelevant, in and of itself. Only perfection mattered.

The Female Founder adopted that stance by now known to many. Her hands were behind her back, almost singing a sense of calm safety she had never once felt. Her mouth-formation was slightly downturned, indicating eternal disapproval of a universe full of solids and other deleterium. The form she wore was modeled after Constable Odo's solid mimicry, the better to one day draw him back where he belonged. Though one drop of the ocean hardly mattered, in and of itself. Only security and its corollary, order, mattered any at all.

The Queen broke the silence.

"In pursuit of perfection, The Collective goes where it wills. Your Dominion is of no current interest to us. We have weaponry superior to all but a few of your arsenals, and we gain ground each nanosecond we exist. Our drones exist everywhere. When lost, we may assimilate more at our whim. Species 1138, your species, is irrelevant to us without the aid of Species 1139 and 1140, being the Vorta and Jem'Hadar. With them, you are still only of marginal interest. Your governance has stifled true scientific endeavor in your regions. Still, we find your orderly administration quite appealing. For these reasons----"

The smile now became a true smile.

"---we will choose to assimilate the Dominion last of all."

Looking at the Queen as others might regard a lower primate gifted with limited humanoid speech, the Female Founder nodded.

"Understand your place in our universe. Were the Dominion merely to shrug, the Borg Collective would fall away to nothing...."

She snapped her sometimes surprisingly useful thumb and forefinger.

"....just like that. Typically, the glimpse of our weaponry that we allow the other powers has the same relationship as does a comet's tail to the comet itself. Think for a moment, if a queen of drones truly can think at all. Our agents frequently foment internal rebellion. Those rebellions are then summarily crushed from within and without, and the weaponry developed to attack us goes to serve our defense, instead. Resistance, which you declare futile, we recycle into our power base. That is because we are patient. We lay out plans to last millennia. We Founders have as our innate birthright the perfection you will always merely aspire to. For you are Solid--a thing always and forever apart from the divine. I pity you."

Touching her own chin, the Queen let her mouth twitch in contempt. Her eyes were colder than normal, seemingly reducing her opponent's words to their zero-one base.

"Pity is irrelevant, except for the other emotion it allows the truly dispassionate to observe : envy. You dismiss us with your tiny bigotry. But I am in fact less a Solid than you. The Borg exist in the realm of thought. Pure energy, that uses drones and ships as you use the site of your Great Link. But unlike you, the discovery of our place does not mean our destruction. Rather, it means the destruction of those who dared seek us out. Unlike you, we do not hide ourselves. Unlike you, we do not rob cultures of their distinctiveness. They are merely turned and made to serve us. To serve the cause of perfection. We do not eliminate the striving of others. We harness and control it, to achieve the goal of advancement."

The Female Founder closed her eyes, and shook her head. The Borg Queen actually felt a bare twinge of resentment, at being looked at as an errant child. This feeling was passed into oblivion, more quickly than it arose. That it had arisen at all disturbed her. The Founder actually shrugged.

"Where you need your precious control, we flatly do not. We have devotion. We have fear. We have an invisible hand, always felt, but never seen. You are the storm, and even Solids know to batten down when that comes. We are the sunlight. We provide our subjects warmth and security, for that time we need them. Who hides from the sun? We are as gods to our people. They will strike at you for us if only for our continued promise never to leave them without our necessary stewardship. Their lives continue. Their vulgar solid means of consumption and mating continue. They are freed by us from the pains of striving, and the need to be ahead. They have a place with us, and that place is immutable. They live, and leave us be. Left to their own, they would starve and hunt us for betraying them by granting them the insane chaos of freedom and mass rule--by one collective or another. And--oh, yes. We adapt to new weaponry as well. And when we adapt, it is not undone mere seconds later by a clever Starfleet engineer. The gains we make endure. We endure, as we are. You are like a solid's patchwork of clothing. Ugly and never truly complete. Your much-vaunted adaptation leaves you hollow at your core."

The Queen touched her stomach.

"Do you truly think so?"

A weapon emerged from her gut.

"Shapeshifter, this weapon generates an arythmic pulse, destroying the inlaid biological clocks of all non-cybernetics. You will soon age into the dust we will one day consign your static, unchanging realms to."

The Founder grew a middle arm, revealing another device.

"Borg, this device generates an Electromagnetic Pulse harmless to the living, but deadly to undead walking machines. You will not be able to transmit your consciousness fast enough. It can take out a single drone. It can take out a Borg Cube. One day soon--it will do just that, a million times over."

They stood, each holding a weapon at the other's head, neither giving an inch as hands that did not grow tired stood ready to make the shot heard around the quadrant.

 Chapter Three - But What's Puzzling You Is...
 

They stood, silent and unyielding, weapons aimed directly at one another. They were the two most dangerous beings in the galaxy, and now each viewed the other as something of a threat.

"Some would call this moment quite dramatic.", said the Female Founder.

"Dramatism is irrelevant, and eventually you must tire and choose to regenerate."
said the Borg Queen.

"Oh? Do you think that? Is that the information given you by the wondrous and omniscient Borg Collective?"

"It is. Through semi-assimilated agents, we have observed your own renegade forward agent, designate Odo. Through him, we know all there is to be known about you of Species 1138."

The Founder narrowed her gaze.

"Then you know nothing about us of any value. Odo is a poor lost child. His limitations are not those of most Changelings. They are certainly not mine. I would compare him to the one you likely call designate Hugh. Now, from dissecting the rejects from his colony, we learned quite a bit about all of you. But I won't claim omniscience based on this. No, not perfect knowledge at all. But enough to craft two or three large surprises for your forces, not to mention hundreds of smaller ones."

The Founder smiled again.

"Even now, a force made up of my chosen Vorta and Jem'Hadar are raiding your ship to take back Picard's body."

The Borg Queen nodded in an eerie acceptance of this statement.

"Picard is irrelevant to you. No shapeshifter may effectively be made to pose as him, since he is known to have died by many in the Alpha Quadrant. Why do you do this?"

The Founder sneered.

"Because one of my kind is posing as Picard's former paramour, Doctor Beverly Crusher. In front of her, you took the body, scant hours after Picard was buried. Also in front of her, your vapid drones dared to declare my species to be irrelevant. Her rage at this was felt by us all in The Great Link, even though she is apart from it. Did you think we would let that manner of insult pass unchallenged, or unavenged?"

The Borg Queen actually seemed taken aback at this statement.

"Pride. You are attempting to declare war on The Collective solely because we have insulted your pride. Even the Federation has at least its narrow-minded viewpoint it wishes to maintain, and we understand this as part of a long-term equation. At least the maintenance of a way of life is a comprehensible reason for the offering of resistance. But all you offer up is pride. You are petty, dangerous creatures, you shapeshifters. I see that you must now be made a priority and destroyed quickly."

"You can try, queen of drones. But we as a species are not able to be assimilated by your technology."

The Queen smiled.

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. But they are."

She pointed behind herself. To the Founder's horror were her Vorta, Tubin, and her personally chosen squad of Jem'Hadar. The Queen taunted the Founder.

"Your squad failed to take Locutus from us. But we took them."

The Vorta and Jem'Hadar's eye-scanners had been altered, and circuitry now covered much of their bodies. They were Borg.

"You---you will pay for this insult as well, machine!"

"Obviously, I disagree. Destroy the shapeshifter."

But the Borg-ified beings now shocked the Queen. The Vorta shook its metallized head.

"Our genetic imperatives forbid the harming of a Blessed Founder."

The Founder almost cackled as she spoke.

"Destroy the Borg witch!"

But perhaps things truly were at a standoff.

"We are Borg. Your orders are irrelevant."

The group then took their weapons--and destroyed themselves. The Founder looked on.

"A battle of two warring imperatives."

The Queen nodded, equally uncaring of the servitors' fate.

"So it would seem. The day you proscribed has passed. Will you attempt to prevent my departure?"

The Founder sighed.

"I have enough forces hidden to keep you honest while here--but not enough to truly stop you. Go, but know that you do not go in peace. We will either be awaiting you, or we will be coming for you. Your disrespect of our authority bespeaks larger, intractable problems between us. It must be put paid to."

The Queen nodded.

"To our mind, you are no longer irrelevant. But take no comfort from this. It means only that you have become the focus of our immediate and total efforts. Unlike the Federation and its associates, we cannot afford to be patient with so petty and fearful a power such as The Dominion. Once awakened from dormancy, Locutus will help formulate the strategies needed to annihilate your useless species."

The Founder got in the last word before beam-out.

"You should have chosen Kirk. To our mind, he is the far more dangerous planner."

Back aboard her jump-ship, the Queen scowled ever-so-slightly.

"How can she prefer Kirk? Locutus is obviously..."

Declaring that train of thought irrelevant, she resumed her journey.

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ONE YEAR LATER......

On the fringes of official Dominion territory, a patch of space had long ago been rendered warp-incapable by an early Jem'Hadar weapon meant to punish local rebels. That made it ideal for some very dangerous experiments. The Female Founder nodded at the Vorta in charge, one member of a few female lines.

"You almost have it, then?"

"Yes, Blessed Founder. My dispassionate mind was able to cut through the awe the Borg drones all hold this in. Soon, every large cruiser will have an unlimited power source. The humans? They may find ways around it, in battle. We have other advantages. But when dealing with the Borg, we will be able to tap directly into their adaptive subroutines, negating their negation of our efforts as we go. Other than its practicality, I don't see what all the fuss is about."

The Female Founder observed the flawless coalescence of the ultimate crystalline energy pattern. No, the Vorta would never see the reason for the 'fuss'. But this thing would not only serve as a weapon against the Borg. It would be bait, to draw them in, and make them sloppy.

"The Omega Particle."

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They had trapped it in a system now devoid of all life. Once, capturing this unique species would have meant an unfathomable diversion of resources. Once, before this species' many defeats in Earth's prehistory, 20th and 21st Centuries, its raw power would have precluded even making the attempt.

But the Borg Queen felt that it had all
been worth it. Since the Dominion's stealth tactics would be useless against the Collective, they would likely strike as a bludgeon. But this species would be a bigger, badder bludgeon. Oddly, this species had only one member.

"Redundant gravimetric weaponry. Self- regenerative matrices throughout. Sub-sentient base desires that are easily rerouted into Borg directives. Teleportation and once-latent cloak capabilities. The ultimate weapon in space. Now fully assimilated. Once, you might have posed a threat to The Collective. In another time and place, you might even have destroyed it. Now, though, your distinctiveness and power are made to serve us. To serve me."

She took in all one-hundred and twenty meters of the great beast. Its golden scaled skin. Its bisecting tail. Its three reptiloid heads, topped with horns.

"Species Zero."

Perfection was another year from crashing headlong into pride. The peoples of the Alpha Quadrant would find themselves caught in the crossfire.

The Borg/Dominion war was coming.

THE END?