An unsettling thought occurred to her: What if the Annuated had never intended that she succeed in her quest to reveal the truth about Kurl and the parasites? Certainly, they had been generous about sharing with her thus far. On the other hand, it was hard for her not to conclude that everything that Trill humanoids knew about the symbionts was what the symbionts had decided to reveal to them, symbiosis notwithstanding. What if they had decided that Trill’s deepest secrets needed to remain buried?
The caretaker’s telepathic “voice” reverberated reassuringly through Dax’s mind. <
“Wonderful.” The heat inside Dax’s suit was rapidly growing intolerable.
Sensing sudden movement behind her, she turned to see another nearly two-meter-long symbiont swimming ponderously toward her from the direction of the monolithic, apparently slumbering forms of the Annuated. Several long, whip-thin, cilia-like tentacles streamed from its body, which was more rust-colored than the first caretaker symbiont.
The ruddy creature undulated and turned one end toward Dax. She couldn’t tell whether that end was its head or its tail. <
Dax reached forward and grabbed two of the tentacles. “Thank you,” she said, ignoring the surge of pain in her burned hand as she established a firm grip.
The giant symbiont moved quickly forward, its armored body rippling as it swam. Dax was pulled along behind it, concentrating all her energy on controlling her breathing and keeping hold of the tentacles. Sweat streamed into her eyes from the intense heat that was flooding her damaged suit.
As they swam forward and upward, Dax noticed that she didn’t recognize the cavern walls her wrist lights were illuminating, as if they were taking an alternate, more expansive route. It made sense that the larger symbionts would use larger travel arteries than would the smaller ones; no matter how slippery their hides, she couldn’t imagine that either of these caretaker symbionts could have passed through the narrower lava-tube channels she had been forced to squeeze through during her initial descent.
<
“More than you can imagine. I just hope that all the secrets I’ve dredged up will calm down some of the chaos that’s going on now up on the surface.”
The caretaker’s psionic “voice” was a study in perplexity. <
The question sounded strange to Dax. “Apparently because my ancestors decided they needed to be kept that way. The destruction of Kurl was stricken from our collective history long ago.”
<> the symbiont said. <
Dax saw an image then, in her mind, similar to those she had received from the Annuated. This time she saw the woman who had been Private Memh, one of those who had deployed biogenic weapons on Kurl, but she was not wearing her dark military uniform. Instead she was dressed in a crimson-stained robe and was praying in her home, her blood flowing freely from the slits on her wrists as someone behind her screamed.
It wasn’t second nature to her to deploy those bombs, Dax thought, correcting her earlier misperception. She was numb when she pressed the button that wiped out the Kurlans. And once she could no longer lie to herself about what she’d done, she killed herself.
“I’m sorry for you,” Dax said quietly.
<> the symbiont said. <>
Dax was finding it hard to concentrate; her breath was coming in increasingly shallow gasps, and the acrid smell of her suit’s burned-out heat exchanger stung her eyes. “We need to go faster. I can’t last much longer.” She wondered if death by asphyxiation, heatstroke, or the bends were the only options left to her.
The symbiont slowed to a stop and floated nearly motionless, and Dax thought she might have offended it somehow. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pressure you. But if I don’t surface soon, I promise you I’m going to die,” she said, her voice raspy from the oppressive heat.
The symbiont’s thoughts suddenly became alarmingly discordant and jangled. <
She looked up as something soft bumped against her shoulder. She saw a symbiont—an ordinary, garden-variety symbiont, she noted—brush against her hand as it swam downward. Then she realized that it was sinking rather than swimming. Angling one of her wrist lights upward, she craned her head back to see what was happening closer to the surface.
Above them, the hot gray water was clotted with symbionts, some moving of their own accord as they fled to the lower depths, others barely fluttering as they were carried by the currents generated by the swimmers. But she could see that many of them were not moving at all, their bodies lifeless, contracted into curls and spirals as though they had died convulsing in agony. Some of the plunging bodies emitted weak bioelectric flashes, a few of which came into direct contact with Ezri’s abdomen, and the Dax symbiont that dwelled there.
Now Dax wasn’t at all certain that she should return to the surface, though she knew her survival depended on it. The snippets of information she gleaned from the passing symbionts were scattered and garbled; even so, it was clear to her that something located near or on the surface had just brutally struck these creatures down en masse.
<
Dax felt lightheaded. She tried to speak, but found her throat so parched that she couldn’t. Then words no longer mattered, and her numb fingers released the caretaker’s cilia.
She drifted downward into the rain of small corpses, enfolded by heat and sweat and stifling darkness.
“Ezri?” The voice was familiar, but sounded as if it were coming from behind the thick duranium hatch of an airlock.
So far away. Let me sleep.
“Ezri Dax?” The voice was back. Insistent. Closer.
Ignore it. Go away.
“Para!”
Dax felt an electrical jolt course through her body, and she thrashed to the side. Her movements were slowed as if she were adrift in deep water. Then, as her senses returned, she realized that she was in water. She was still deep in the pools below Mak’ala, where an outsize, millennia-old symbiont had been ferrying her back to the surface.
But someone else was here with her now.
“You’re awake,” that someone said, and she finally recognized the voice.
Taulin. She could make out his form in the darkness as her eyesight returned, and she saw that he, too, was clad in an EV suit. He floated about a meter away from her. But something was wrong with him. His face, clearly visible through his bubble helmet thanks to the glare of her own suit lights, was etched deeply with lines of pain.
“What’s wrong?” Dax asked, her tongue thick, her words coming with frustrating slowness.
A small, ordinary-looking symbiont swam near Cyl, It orbited him almost protectively, although it, too, seemed to be in pain. Cyl reached out his gauntleted hand, touching the side of the faceplate on Dax’s helmet. “They set off some kind of radiation-dispersal device on the surface. It irradiated all the joined Trill there, as well as the symbionts in the upper pools. Must have killed hundreds of symbionts.” He gestured toward
the small symbiont that swam beside him. “Fal here was one of the lucky ones.”
Dax felt another electric jolt, this one composed entirely of her own fear for the vulnerable symbionts. Her senses all seemed to become crystalline, hyperacute. “How widespread was this thing?”
“It seemed to affect those nearest the surface the most,” the general said, his voice sounding tinny over the helmet speaker.
<
“Is it safe to go back to the surface?” Dax asked no one in particular. Her personal fear was escalating alongside the terrible sickness she was beginning to feel because of Cyl’s revelations. The fact that she was still alive at all struck her as nearly miraculous. “My suit’s environmental module was damaged. I can’t stay down here any longer.”
“I know. I replaced your module with mine,” the general said. “You have as long as you need to get back to the surface.”
“But how will you—”
“We are becoming unjoined,” the Cyl symbiont said, an arc of electricity traveling from the general’s abdomen to hers. “Our travels will take us where you have just been. To the Annuated.”
Dax realized that Cyl must already have conversed for some time with the caretaker symbiont. The general must indeed be near death for the ancient creature to tell him of the final mortal destination of all symbionts, and the accumulated memories carried within them.
She tried to blink away sudden tears. “No! There’s got to be some other way. Some way to heal you.” She thought of Julian. Surely he could find a way to prevent both Cyl and Taulin from expiring, if only she could get everyone out of this place quickly.
Taulin, the humanoid half of the general’s failing symbiosis, spoke again. Being joined herself, she found it easy to distinguish Taulin from Cyl, especially since the melding of the two minds had so obviously come undone. “There isn’t, Ezri. What was done to me on the surface cannot be undone. I have lived a long life, and my symbiont has lived far longer. I think we have served our people well.”
“You’re both going to die?’ Dax asked, her voice choked.
“We do not know,” the Cyl symbiont said. “Taulin Kengro will no longer live in this body. The future is unknowable for me. But we must go now. To preserve the past, both Taulin’s and Cyl’s.”
“I hope you found something that can save our people,” Taulin said, wincing against a new spasm of pain. “It has been an honor to know you, Ezri Dax.”
“I hope…I hope we’ll know one another again someday.”
“But not soon,” Cyl answered. “Dax has much living yet to do.”
Tears rolled down Ezri’s cheek. For the first time, she noticed how cool the air inside her suit had become, thanks to Cyl’s and Taulin’s act of sacrifice.
Cyl slipped away from Dax and began to descend, in a slow, lazy free fall. The small symbiont that had accompanied him followed him down.
Dax aimed her wrist light down and watched him sinking away from her.
And then a whisker-thin arc of blue-white energy sparked toward her from out of the depths, connecting briefly to the symbiont in her abdomen.
“Good-bye, Para,” Neema said to Audrid, using the childhood nickname. “I always wanted to see Mak’relle Dur.”
The water below her erupted in a burst of oxygen bubbles. Dax knew that Taulin Kengro had opened his environmental suit to allow the Cyl symbiont egress.
The bubbles floated silently past Dax, and all she saw below her was darkness, utter and complete.
A moment later, she felt a presence behind her. Dax turned, and her wrist lights illuminated the large symbiont who had accompanied her up from the depths.
<> the caretaker said, gently wrapping a pair of its cilia-like tentacles around one of Dax’s arms. <
16
Stardate 53778.8
After concluding the final surgical procedure he was to perform on this very long night, Bashir carefully made his way across the four wide city blocks that separated Manev Central Hospital from the Senate Tower. Although a few passes of a dermal regenerator had removed the visual evidence of the mugging he had suffered the previous evening, the memory of the assault remained vivid in Bashir’s mind. His body, too, reminded him of the incident frequently as he walked; his ribs remained sore because he hadn’t yet found the time to treat his minor but annoying deep-tissue injuries.
Sore or not, the attack had left him determined to walk back to the Senate Tower rather than attempt to find public transportation.
As he was ushered past the ubiquitous police barricades by his official escort, Bashir relished the bracing chill of the predawn air. Though he knew that walking was not his safest option, the distance he had to cover was short. And he would be alerted if his most recent patient were to need him while a government hovercar was ferrying her from the sprawling hospital’s rooftop to the graceful Senate Tower.
Although the situation on the street remained chaotic, the size of the protesting crowds had diminished considerably throughout the long night, undoubtedly because of the high death toll—among both the joined and the unjoined—in the immediate vicinity of the neurogenic weapons detonations. The police were maintaining a substantial presence, but fortunately no one seemed overly eager to provoke them—at least for the moment. Bashir saw anger and resentment etched across so many faces that the emotions were becoming an almost palpable presence.
Half an hour later, he found himself gazing down at the streets of Leran Manev through the broad, polarized windows that encircled the Senate Tower’s top-floor observation deck. The sun was rising across Manev Bay, and its light dappled the government sector’s wide reflecting pools with traceries of purple and orange. Standing in silence, Bashir surveyed the chaos below.
Everything looked different from the top of the tower, prompting him to wonder if the unjoined on the streets below would ever see eye to eye with those who dwelled on the lofty parapets of the joined. He counted eight small fires guttering amid the piles of shattered window glass and the hulks of burned hovercars and skimmers. Several hundred people remained visible along the sidewalks, gathered in small, persistent clusters; they seemed to keep a wary distance from a nearby phalanx of equally vigilant armored police officers. He couldn’t tell if they were looters, protesters, or members of families seeking their lost loved ones.
To Bashir’s weary eyes, the crowd’s anger seemed as likely to reignite as it was to dissipate. Let’s just hope nobody down there does anything stupid before the president makes her address. He tried to see the reinforced presence of the police as a hopeful augury, a sign that the Trill government still functioned, regardless of the previous night’s upheavals. But he knew that they could just as easily be seen as symbols of oppressive, arbitrary authority.
How many people died yesterday because of the chaos down there? He wondered how many other Trill cities had experienced similar social convulsions, both from the unjoined rioters and the terrorists who had struck from their midst. Though he hadn’t yet taken the time to troll the newsnets for detailed information, he assumed that the worldwide death toll, including the radiation-stricken joined—the victims of more than a dozen separate clusters of neurogenic radiation bombs around the planet—had to be in the multiple thousands. He was grateful, at least, that the neurogenic radiation seemed to have had no lingering effects after its initial explosive release; other than the rioting and related “social fallout,” it was once again safe for the joined who hadn’t been exposed to the blasts to walk the streets of Trill’s cities.
The weird quiet of the distant street tableau was broken by the sound of purposef
ul footfalls directly behind him. He recognized their cadence immediately.
“Hello, Ezri,” he said before turning to face her. He took a step toward the woman he loved, almost surrendering to an impulse to gather her into his arms; once the comm channels had cleared up somewhat, he had learned how close he had come to losing her at Mak’ala. But the brooding shadows of her ice-blue eyes nearly froze him in his tracks, like the stare of a basilisk.
Clearly, her experiences in the deep caverns had had a profound effect on her. He sensed the gulf of centuries that yawned between them as never before, and it chilled him.
“The president is going to make a planetwide address in a few minutes, Julian,” she said, her hands clasped behind her back.
He nodded, suddenly unsure of what to do with his own hands. He realized that the past several hours had kept him so busy that he had received only the most cursory of briefings about the potentially incendiary discoveries Ezri had made at Mak’ala. But he knew the gist of it.
It also occurred to him that he knew even less about what she intended to do with the information she had unearthed.
“How much does the president know?” he said quietly.
“Everything,” Ezri said. “At least everything I know. I gave her a full report before she went into surgery.”
“Are you sure that was wise?”
She glowered at him, folding her arms across her chest. “Of course not, Julian. But as you’ve observed yourself on more than one occasion, our habit of secrecy hasn’t been very healthy for us.”
He could see from her defensive posture that now wasn’t the ideal time to second-guess her decisions. She was, after all, still in command of this mission. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize. I was just curious about the details.”
Ezri seemed mollified by that. “I told Maz all about the ancient Kurlan colony, as well as the disease that arose there. And the genetic engineering project that created the parasites. And…” She trailed off, casting a nervous glance at the observation windows.
Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Two Page 19
