“If we try to reach the hatch, we’ll be directly in the crowd’s line of fire,” said Cyl.
Keru had noticed the same thing. “Give me some cover fire. I think I can get inside.”
Cyl checked the charge on his phaser. “What exactly are you planning on doing?”
Keru grinned. “I’m going to put up an electric fence—Starfleet style.”
Cyl nodded, a grin of his own slowly spreading across his weather-beaten face. He raised his phaser. “I’ll give you some covering fire. Ready when you are, Mister Keru.”
Keru nodded, took a deep breath, and stepped back three paces, his heart racing. You don’t know how much you miss the adventure until it’s gone, he thought. Sprinting forward, he launched himself off the ledge and into the cool morning air.
Even as he heard the whine of Cyl’s covering fire, Keru landed in a crouch on top of the runabout, skidding forward to a point just behind the cockpit. Flattening his body as best he could, he spider-crawled his way toward the center of the craft, where—in response to the authorization code he tapped into a discreetly concealed keypad—a round access hatch opened into the Jefferies tube that connected with the runabout’s interior. He felt the vessel rock slightly in response to a few quick pulses of phaser fire; fortunately, none of the hits appeared to have had any great effect on the runabout’s hull. Well, they know I’m here, Keru thought with a grim smile. But they probably don’t know what’s coming next.
Quickly making his way forward to the cockpit, Keru sat down at the aft port system chair, where he activated the tactical systems.
He studied the readouts for a moment, his mind racing to try to figure out exactly how he was going to accomplish what he needed to do. It’s been too long since I’ve piloted so much as a simulator, he thought, finally beginning to doubt his chances of success. He knew that Sean, a career conn officer, would have been able to do this blindfolded. What would he have done?
A minute passed, then two. And then, as though guided by the hands of his dead lover, Keru knew exactly what he needed to do.
Once Keru had reached the top of the runabout, Cyl scrambled down the slope, barely managing to avoid a rapid volley of blasts. He’d made himself a target, hoping to divert the radicals’ attention from the massive Guardian.
Cyl felt safe for the moment, crouched behind the portable duranium blast shields that the small military unit had erected between themselves and the mob. Still, he was saddened to see that several of his soldiers had been captured by the protesters during the skirmishes.
He caught the attention of the highest-ranking person he could find. “Lieutenant, when I give the command—which I’m hoping to do within about two minutes—I want all of our troops to retreat by twenty meters.”
The young female officer looked bewildered. “Twenty meters? Sir, we’ll literally be up against the cave entrance. We’ll be giving up all our maneuvering room.”
“You won’t need it if what we have planned works. If it doesn’t work, I won’t give the signal. Just tell the troops.”
With a worried glance, the lieutenant began relaying the order down the line.
Cyl kept his eye on the runabout, trying to clear his mind of the shouts and shots that rang through the air. The seconds ticked by. One minute.
He realized that he was holding his breath, and exhaled. Two minutes. Another thirty seconds passed.
A beam of pale, bluish light suddenly flashed out of the forward viewport of the spacecraft. “Now, Lieutenant!” Cyl barked.
“Retreat!” the lieutenant yelled, and the embattled soldiers stepped backward.
For a moment, the crowd was unsure what was happening, and then they surged forward en masse—and were just as quickly stopped, their bodies bouncing off an immovable object. Their phaser blasts ricocheted in midair, as did several rocks and other projectiles the protesters threw.
The lieutenant and several of his men looked over at Cyl, puzzled expressions on their faces. Cyl grinned and pointed to the runabout. “Our Guardian friend modified the ship’s force fields to enclose everything from the skirmish line to the cave’s entrance. Nobody is going to get into the caves now.”
The soldiers cheered, some of them pounding each other on the back. Almost all of them, Cyl was pleased to note, remained vigilant.
Then one of the nearby troopers pointed into the crowd, calling to the lieutenant. “Sir! The hostiles are driving a vehicle toward us!”
Cyl turned to see that someone had indeed driven a cargo skimmer into the crowd, which was now stirred well toward panic. The general hoped that common sense would entice the gathering to disperse before anyone was seriously hurt.
“Don’t worry,” Cyl told the lieutenant as he watched the skimmer make its herky-jerky approach through the crowd. “They can’t get that thing through the force field.” He felt reasonably certain that the Starfleet shields would hold easily against such a relatively unsophisticated attack.
But the driver didn’t seem intent on continuing his approach to the shield boundary. Instead, he stopped, exited the skimmer, and scrambled onto the vehicle’s roof.
Cyl couldn’t hear what the driver was shouting, but in a blink, the skimmer exploded with light, forcing him to avert his eyes. Cyl’s dazzled eyes could barely make out the multicolored disturbances in the runabout’s force fields, punctuated by tiny, short-lived conflagrations that resembled thousands of glowing, flame-loving mun’ika bugs stupidly immolating themselves in a fire.
Then his vision went white. Inside his abdomen, the Cyl symbiont spasmed in agony, sending waves of pain through every system in his body.
What have they done? Cyl thought just before a blanket of darkness mercifully replaced the excruciating white light.
His vision still slowly clearing perhaps a minute after the dazzling light-pulse had come and gone, Keru found he had to open the runabout’s hatch manually, since some of the ship’s electrical systems seemed to have failed. Luckily, a backup console confirmed that his improvised force field was continuing to hold. Not that it mattered much at the moment, since everyone outside was either writhing on the ground or not moving at all.
The runabout’s sensors could tell him precious little about the detonation. Though the blast wave had consisted primarily of a fairly standard electromagnetic pulse, it also had apparently carried some unknown type of fast-dissipating radiation. The radiation evidently hadn’t penetrated the runabout’s hull, where its shields were strongest, but might well have pierced the force fields nearest the cave entrance, where the fields would have been at their most attenuated. Fortunately, the readings confirmed that there was little if any danger now of his being exposed to lingering radiation. Hoping no other bombs were present, he opened the force field where it surrounded the hatch and clambered outside.
As he approached the soldiers, Keru was grateful to see that most of them appeared to be either temporarily stunned or dazzled by the flash. None of them seemed to have been hurt nearly as badly as had those on the other side of the force field.
Except for one. Taulin Cyl.
The general lay on his back, and Keru could see that his abdomen was roiling beneath his uniform jacket. His symbiont is going into shock. Keru had only seen this happen twice before during his brief tenure as a Guardian. On both occasions, they had tried to save the symbiont by returning it to the pools; only once had their efforts succeeded.
Keru yelled over to two of the soldiers who seemed the least affected by the blast. “Come help me with General Cyl! We’ve got to get him into the caves!”
Minutes later, they had managed to carry him down from the rocky outcropping that overlooked the plain and up into the cavern’s mountainside entrance, where it seemed that the majority of the Guardians were also mostly unaffected by the blast; only those who had been nearest the entrance during the detonation were partially blinded, and none showed any other ill effects. But as they brought Cyl nearer to the pools, Keru heard a mournful keening issuing
from deeper in the caves.
Keru saw several of the Guardians standing near the closest of the pools, watched them screaming and thrusting their hands into the murky water, witnessed the shock and despair etched into their faces as they turned and regarded their equally horrified brethren. And then he saw why they were wailing.
The surfaces of the pools were clotted with floating symbionts, but the only movements they made were either the result of the Guardians trying vainly to assist them, or were caused by other symbionts floating up from below, jostling the small lumpen bodies that bobbed on the surface like so many rotting bogblossoms.
Keru and the others fell to their knees as the enormity of the situation became apparent. They’ve killed the symbionts. The thought came as a scream in Keru’s mind, and he couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t shouted it aloud.
Cyl groaned and reached up to clutch his arm. “Something’s…wrong with…” He seemed too fatigued and distressed to finish his warning.
Knowing that the time to grieve would have to wait until later, Keru stood and dragged Cyl toward the largest of the pools, the one that Dax had dived into just an hour or so earlier. Many of the floating symbionts had already begun to sink again, like balloons that were losing their air.
“We need to extract his symbiont,” Keru shouted to a pair of Guardians who stood nearby, looking stunned. “It’s still alive.” He removed Cyl’s jacket and pushed him into the water, entering the pool with the general. He held Cyl’s arms to keep him from flopping face-first into the water.
And then, miraculously, a silver discharge arced across the water toward Cyl. Moments later, a weaker discharge came from the general’s bloated abdominal pouch, and Keru saw dark, indistinct movement underneath the pool’s gray surface.
“They’re communicating!” one of the Guardians shouted. “They’re not dead, at least not all of them.”
Cyl rolled in the water and looked toward Keru, his eyes ablaze with a light that resembled insanity. “I need to go down there. Dax is in trouble.”
“What?” Keru was unsure he had heard the general correctly.
“Dax is still down in the deep pools. She needs my help. Fal told me. Get me an environmental suit.”
“Sir…”
Cyl’s eyes met his with an imploring look. “Get it now, Mister Keru. Please. We haven’t much time.”
Two Guardians held Cyl in place as Keru climbed from the pool and ran out of the caves into the gathering night. He was out of breath and shivering by the time he reached the runabout to fetch the remaining two environmental suits, but he didn’t allow himself to pause for breath. By the time he got back to the pools, he felt as if his lungs were on fire.
Keru saw that the general was sitting on the rocks at the side of the pool. Though he looked as pale as death, Cyl wore an expression of defiant determination.
“I haven’t been affected by the blast, General,” Keru said. “I ought to go with you.” Or instead of you, he thought.
“I’m perfectly capable of handling this on my own, Mister Keru.” Cyl took one of the suits from Keru’s big hands and started donning it.
Keru scowled, not fooled for a moment by the general’s brave show. He reached for the other suit and began putting it on. Cyl laid an unsteady hand on his shoulder, stopping him.
“No. Stay here, Mister Keru. You have injured friends who need first aid. More importantly, you have to tend to the symbionts. The few who’ve survived are going to need your help badly.”
“You’re…not well, General.”
“That’s not as important at the moment as making certain that Lieutenant Dax fulfills her mission.”
Finally accepting the inevitability of Cyl’s decision, Keru set his own suit down and began to help Cyl finish suiting up. As he worked, Keru heard volitional movement from at least one other symbiont in the pool, a sign that both buoyed his spirits and confirmed that the general was right. The symbionts are going to need my help more than they ever have before.
As he locked the helmet to the environmental suit’s neck ring, Keru noticed that Cyl now seemed calmer, more in command of himself. But intense pain remained evident in the general’s eyes, and was betrayed by the random, spasmodic twitches of his forehead and jawline.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done here today,” the general said, once again placing his gloved hand on Keru’s shoulder. “And neither Cyl nor I blame you for what has happened. Without your help, many more of us would be gone.”
It didn’t escape Keru that the general had referred to the symbiont within him as though it were a separate entity. He wondered if the words the general had spoken hadn’t come entirely from either Taulin or Cyl. His symbiosis is dissolving, he thought, and a profound sadness settled across his soul.
“If you’re not back in two hours, I’m coming after you,” Keru said.
Fully suited, Taulin Cyl stepped into the pool and slipped beneath the murky, corpse-strewn waters. Keru watched him vanish, leaving not even a stream of bubbles in his wake. He wished he’d asked the general if he had any messages he wanted relayed to his loved ones.
And hoped he wouldn’t have to fulfill that same promise for Ezri Dax.
14
Stardate 53777.6
Bashir rejoined the busy trauma teams mere minutes before a veritable flood of new injured patients entered the already bustling triage center. Except for a few dozen unjoined individuals who had suffered grievous injuries—apparently as a result of hovercar failures and the like caused by the bombs’ radiation pulses—virtually all of the first hundred or so patients to be carried, dragged, or gurneyed into Manev Central Hospital were joined Trills.
Though the sudden influx of ailing and dying joined had stretched the hospital’s already strained resources well past their limits, Bashir knew that he and his medical colleagues had no choice but to soldier on. He tried his best to attend to the unjoined who seemed a secondary priority to the staff. Over the course of the next hour or so, he came to understand clearly that the joined had to be bumped to the head of the line. The sight of the lifeless body of Dr. Renhol—the woman from the Symbiosis Commission whose desire for Trill secrecy he had accommodated five years earlier—brought that realization home with brutal finality. Her symbiont had been removed and transported either to a symbiont-specific care facility, or back to Mak’ala or one of the other breeding pools. Nobody seemed to know whether or not it had survived.
It occurred to him that Renhol had been the prominent commissioner who’d been gurneyed into the trauma room while he was preoccupied with saving the life of a grievously injured small boy. Though he didn’t regret the choice he’d made, Renhol’s passing pained him nonetheless.
Another thing that bothered him was that nearly all the medical personnel here—joined and unjoined alike, from Dr. Vadel Torvin on down—seemed far too quick to sacrifice the hosts of those injured symbionts. The hosts whom Dr. Torvin had declared beyond saving—despite the fact that most of them had sustained no life-threatening injuries—received about as much regard as had the hospital’s backlog of unjoined casualties.
Which was to say they were being ignored completely.
Now bereft of their symbionts, fourteen former hosts were currently being left untended even as the medics carefully transferred their symbionts into nutrient-rich, hyronalin-saturated mobile symbiont pools in preparation for their transportation to Mak’ala or one of Trill’s other natural symbiont habitats. In this way, the Trill doctors hoped to save the symbionts’ accumulated memories and experiences, though the hosts that had carried the creatures were to be sacrificed to accomplish this.
But Bashir knew that there was no guarantee that the symbiont pools would be of any help to the creatures. Many of them seemed simply too far gone from the radiation their delicate and extraordinarily complex neural tissues had absorbed. And he wasn’t even sure that the very same terrorist weapons that had detonated in central Leran Manev hadn’t also been placed elsewhe
re. Who was to say that other such devices hadn’t also irradiated the Mak’ala pools?
Still, he had to concede that he could suggest no workable alternative to the removal of the symbionts—at least not yet, though he hadn’t stopped querying the hospital computers about alternative methodologies. And despite the megadoses of isoboramine and other symbiogenic neurotransmitters he had injected into scores of other dying joined people, they were growing progressively weaker, expiring right before his eyes. Their symbioses inevitably grew tenuous, rapidly dissolving as each of the symbionts went into convulsive neuroleptic shock. The joined who had taken the brunt of the neurogenic pulses were experiencing extreme autoimmune reactions, rejecting their symbionts as though the creatures were foreign, invading bodies.
It struck Bashir as ironic that this was precisely how the symbionts were regarded by the neo-Purist radicals, who were the only really likely culprits behind the radiation attacks.
One of the hardest things for a doctor to do was to watch a patient die. But Bashir seemed to have little choice in the matter. He knew all too well that a joining between a compatible host and a symbiont would become permanent after the first several days, after which time the host would be incapable of surviving without the symbiont. After crossing this physiological threshold, the two effectively merged into a single, indissoluble being. To separate symbiont from host past that point was to kill the host, just as surely as a terrestrial human would die following the removal of his or her liver, even though the organ might live on via transplantation to another person’s body.
From the severity of their autoimmune reactions, Bashir expected most of these hosts to take an hour or less to die once their symbionts were extracted. A few expired almost instantly after the removal of their symbionts, despite his best efforts to save them.
Such is the Trill reverence for the preservation of memories, he told himself as yet another host, a middle-aged woman, slipped away from him. He hoped that her radiation-plagued symbiont would somehow find a means of regenerating itself in the network of aqueous subterranean caverns where the unjoined symbionts spawned and recuperated between joinings. At least the dead woman’s experiences would live on in the symbiont, assuming it survived.
Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Two Page 17
