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“Nobody goes into the Denorios Belt if they can help it-it’s a huge navigation hazard. I guess the smuggler was counting on that.” She shook her head. “Unfortunately, the Cardassians were feeling particularly bold, and followed him in. That’s when they found the wormhole.”

“A wormhole?” Troi said.

Kira nodded. “It’s a stable wormhole, and it leads to the Gamma Quadrant. The Cardassian ship went through and came back several times.”

Ro asked, “How come we haven’t heard of this?”

The Ferengi spoke up, then. “If you found a stable wormhole, would you advertise it to the galaxy?”

Troi said, “Yes, actually.”

That prompted a snaggletoothed smile from the Ferengi. “Can tell you’re not Cardassian. They kept it their little secret.”

“A stable wormhole is impossible,” Ro said.

“Not anymore,” Kira said. “It’s been there for years now, always opening in the Denorios Belt on one end and in the Idran system in the Gamma Quadrant on the other.” Kira took a breath. “The Cardassians kept the wormhole classified. Only a few guls and legates knew about it at first. They sent a few ships to explore the other side.”

“They also,” the Ferengi added, “let other entrepreneurs go through for a small fee.”

“Such as yourself,” Worf said witheringly.

“Exactly. And I was the one who found out about the Dominion.”

Ro asked, “And what is the Dominion?”

“A massive interstellar empire in the Gamma Quadrant,” Kira said. “The Founders of the Dominion are shapechangers. Decades ago, they sent out a hundred infants into space. One fell through the wormhole and was found in the Denorios Belt. He was taken in by a Bajoran scientist and called himself Odo. He eventually became security chief of the Promenade on Terok Nor.”

“And he is a shapechanger?” Worf asked.

Ro said, “I can confirm that. He served the Cardassians for a long time. But he was replaced recently, right?”

Kira smiled. “The Cardassians have been trying to find him for more than a year now with no luck. But he realized that he’d found his people-and that his people wanted to conquer the Alpha Quadrant.”

Troi asked, “Then why have we heard nothing about this Dominion?”

“Because they don’t come in with guns blazing to conquer worlds like the Cardassians or the Klingons do. Instead, they sent in a number of the Founders to take the place of important people in the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Cardassian governments. I’m fairly sure they replaced Gul Dukat-he’s the prefect of Terok Nor-and they’ve done likewise elsewhere in the galaxy. The war you people are fighting? That was the Dominion’s work. Remember, it all started with an unprovoked attack by a Romulan ship on a Klingon outpost. Nobody knows why that Romulan ship attacked-but our guess is that it was a shapechanger who replaced the subcommander in charge of that vessel and then gave the order to fire on the outpost. The Klingons and Romulans took it from there.”

Worf was extremely skeptical. “Why should we believe this story?”

“Because I don’t have any reason to lie!” Kira was shouting now. “And because the Cardassians are making their move with the Dominion’s help. You think it’s a coincidence that Central Command’s moving on you now, when all three powers have been devastated by the war? And where do you think they got their new weapons from?”

That brought Worf up short. Starfleet Intelligence had been caught completely off guard by the Cardassians’ new weapons, and had yet to determine their source. The phased polaron beam was far beyond what the Cardassians should have been able to develop and deploy on their own, and they had apparently done so entirely in secret, which Worf had found impossible to credit. No intelligence-gathering agency had a perfect record, but SI was never that bad.

But if the weapons came from another quadrant…

No, the idea was absurd.

Kira was still talking. “The Dominon have shock troops called the Jem’Hadar. They provided the new weapons. Once the war has gone on long enough to leave all three participants