The Judgment Bar Approaches

[Sorehl 0]

The captured Vorta, Armante, imagined he should be shivering.

 

The Founders, in their wisdom, had removed such outward signs of anxiety from his species during their extensive genetic engineering. Vorta ancestors had been small, timid woodland creatures who’d dwelt in hollowed-out trees. They had aided the gods, who had fulfilled their promise and transformed his kind, shaping them into able overseers of the great interstellar empire.

 

And he was being called before them.

 

In the five years since the Alpha Quadrant War, the Founders had remained in a strictly enforced “splendid isolation” on their new homeworld, counseling and considering the outcome of the war with Odo in the Great Link. With limited instruction, they had left behind administration of the Dominion itself to their trusted advisors, the Vorta, as in centuries past.

 

It was no small measure of his treachery that the Founders would break this link and summon him to them. From the confines of his cell aboard the Jem’Hadar fighter, Armante gathered his thoughts, examining his rationale for submitting to the Hundred. In a very real sense, the judgment bar approached.

 

* * * * *

 

From the back row of the Main Conference Room on Deck 2, Captain Sorehl reviewed data provided by his three-day examination of the captured Vorta. The neurocortical simulator, itself a product of Dominion engineering, had yielded a wealth of intelligence from its unknowing subject.

 

The method of interrogation remained a personal subject of ethical debate. “You’re only using the same tool they use on others,” K’Vorlag had reasoned. Sorehl rejected the simplicity of such logic as specious, unwilling to abandon Federation ideals so quickly. He would use neither painstik or agonizer if the prisoner had been Klingon.

 

Sorehl glanced toward the Round Table, where Ambassador N’Kedre and the Vorta Semil were vocally deliberating the future of the prisoner. Admiral Day seemed to be trying to calm both parties. K’Vorlag, for his part, merely clenched his mug of bloodwine tighter.

 

Sorehl returned to his own thoughts. Although he had opted used the Dominion-made simulator, he had crafted no tortuous illusions nor strained his subject with imagined traumas. Indeed, the scenario he’d devised was a very real possibility if Semil won his argument. Sorehl returned to his datapad and the details their prisoner had given.

 

* * * * *

 

Armante knelt before the Founder, bowing low. Despite his break with them, he still felt the compulsion of respect in the divine presence. It had been so upon his first audience with the Hundred. Overwhelmed by the apparent conflict in their directives, he had sought the certainty of his termination implant to avoid betraying either. A mere Vorta should not have to choose between gods. But death had not come, his implant somehow disabled. He’d been forced to make a choice anyway – obey those who’d sealed the heavens or those who’d deigned to appear before him. And now, the accounting would come.

 

“Explain yourself,” came the instruction from his former master.

 

“I serve the Founders,” the Vorta commenced. And he told all he knew…