by Andy Mangels
Cyl lowered his weapon, and moments later, Hiziki Gard and another military man stepped into the room. The second man—Trebor—was limping.
“What’s the situation here?” Gard asked.
“We’ve neutralized all of them,” Cyl said. “Including the man who was evidently leading this particular group.” He paused, gesturing toward the senator’s lifeless body. “They killed Talris, and installed what we believe to be some kind of explosive device here. Doctor Bashir used his ship’s transporter to beam the device into space.”
“Do we know what kind of bomb it was?” Gard asked.
“We don’t even know for sure if it was a bomb,” Ezri said. “But we couldn’t afford to take any chances.”
A beeping noise sounded from the wall’s comm unit, and then a female voice spoke. “General Cyl, Patrol Vessel TDM-one-twelve reports that a small device did just detonate above the atmosphere in the vicinity of the coordinates you specified. They report that it sent out some kind of electromagnetic pulse, but it dissipated before they could analyze it. They say it was more flash than substance, though.”
Bashir smiled grimly. Though the bomb apparently hadn’t been all that powerful, his decision to dispose of it had been correct. Maybe he had finally earned some respect from Cyl and Gard.
“What’s the status of the riot outside?” Cyl said, still speaking into the comm unit.
“The police are keeping the crowds back,” the voice from the wall reported. “But there have been a significant number of injuries and a good deal more violence than we expected.” She hesitated, then resumed. “One of the neo-Purist leaders has sent out a planetwide message on the comnet. It’s going out live right now. We’re recording it and attempting to trace the feed back to its source.”
“I’ll view it in one of the Senate offices,” Cyl said. “In the meantime, send a security team to the prep room behind the speaker’s platform, level three. Senator Talris was murdered here, and his body will need to be transferred to the coroner. Officer Trebor will be here to brief the team when it arrives. And send a general alert to all police and military units to be on the lookout for other bombs that might have been planted in public locations across Trill. Cyl out.”
“If there are other bombs planted elsewhere on Trill,” Bashir said, “they could detonate at any time.”
Ezri nodded, looking glum. “And there’s no way to be sure of finding them all.”
The general clicked off the comm unit, then faced Bashir, Ezri, and Gard. Without commenting on Bashir’s and Ezri’s words, Cyl moved briskly toward the door and gestured for them to follow him.
Ezri and Gard followed the general out of the chamber and back into the hallway. Before following, Bashir took a moment to cover the slain senator’s body—as well as the corpse of his killer—with the tarp that had formerly shrouded the bomb.
After walking into the corridor, he stepped over the rubble and the dead revolutionary trapped beneath it. He caught a glimpse of the man’s face.
Bashir wondered what kind of person this man had been before the current unrest had engulfed his planet. Is your cause worth dying for? Is it worth killing for?
But the Trill man was dead and gone. He would never answer those questions. And Bashir had the horrible feeling that he would have to ask them many more times before he got a satisfactory answer.
7
President Maz was still unreachable via comlink, which wasn’t surprising given the tremendous degree of disorder that had suddenly engulfed the city center. Many of the comm frequencies were jammed, though the emergency channels remained open.
Dax agreed with Cyl’s assessment that there was little the four of them could do to alter the course of the riot, especially now that Senator Talris—who’d represented the best hope for a peaceful resolution to the crisis—was dead. Dax and Cyl entered the late legislator’s sparsely furnished office, where Julian and Gard had already activated the desk computer.
“Let’s see exactly what the neo-Purists have to say,” Gard said as he patched Talris’s computer into the newsnet, where it grabbed the broadcast that had been recorded moments earlier.
“Which one of the neo-Purist leaders issued this latest statement?” Julian asked Cyl.
“Does it matter?” Gard asked as he finished tapping the interface console. Clearly his sympathies toward the unjoined protesters who sought openness from their government did not extend to terrorists.
“My people inform me it was Nas Ditrel,” said Cyl, his jaw set in a hard line. “She’s one of the group’s most prominent spokespeople.”
A moment later a middle-aged woman appeared on the screen, her hard, angular face framed by a thick ring of dark brown spots. A simple blue drapery was all that was visible of the background behind her, making an assessment of her physical location essentially impossible. Though she appeared gaunt and haggard, her voice rang with strength and determination. Still, Dax thought she looked stressed almost to the point of physical and emotional collapse.
Ditrel began without preamble, speaking rapidly but precisely. “Thanks to today’s Starfleet testimony before the Senate—as well as long-classified government archaeological records that have recently come into our possession—we have verified that there is indeed a link not only between the symbionts and the parasitic creatures who recently attacked Bajor and attempted to attack our world, but also a close relationship between the parasites and the extinct civilization on the distant planet Kurl.”
Dax felt as though a great chasm had suddenly opened beneath her feet. She suddenly understood Cyl’s impulse toward secrecy. These people are acting on information I supplied to the Senate in a public forum.
She realized suddenly that Julian was beside her, and had taken her hand. His brown eyes were brimming with compassion, as though he had read her thoughts. “It isn’t your fault, Ezri. You were obliged to answer the Senate’s questions.”
She glanced at Gard and Cyl; their hard expressions made her wonder if they might not be quite so forgiving.
“President Maz’s government has been concealing this from you,” Ditrel continued, interrupting Dax’s reverie. “As has the Senate and centuries of their predecessors. The same power structure that uses symbiosis to keep the vast majority of us ‘in our places’ apparently doesn’t want you to know that the Kurlans were in fact ancient Trill colonists.” The woman paused, as though allowing her listeners time to digest her last statement.
Dax found that statement patently absurd; from Julian’s bewildered scowl, she gathered that he did as well. Gard and Cyl were stone-faced, essentially unreadable.
Have they heard this before, too?
“Can you pause the playback?” Dax asked Gard, who immediately entered a command into the terminal, freezing Nas’s image and muting her voice.
“This proves that neo-Purists or other unjoined radicals have infiltrated the government pretty thoroughly,” Cyl said, shaking his head. His stoic demeanor had begun to give way to a deeply troubled expression. “Somehow, they found out about the parasites’ affinity for Kurlan artifacts.”
“But the rest of it sounds like pure conspiracy-theory fiction,” Gard said to Cyl. “Most people will find stories about ancient, forgotten Trill colonies pretty farfetched.”
Dax nodded. “That’s just what I was thinking.”
“I’m glad to see I’m not the odd man out here,” said Julian, releasing Dax’s hand. “From my reading of Trill history, your people didn’t make much use of warp technology until about three centuries ago.”
“It was actually a little longer ago than that,” Dax said. “Trill had already developed warp drive by the time Vulcans made first contact with us.” She recalled that Lela, the Dax symbiont’s first host, had been a little girl at the time of first contact. That initial visit by the Vulcans had generated a great deal of fear among the Trill populace, which had found itself divided on the issue of whether or not to accept alien interaction.
“But the
Kurlans were already extinct millennia before that,” Julian said. “Most exoarchaeologists believe they succumbed either to a plague or to biowarfare many centuries before the Trill became capable of interstellar travel. How could anyone believe the Kurlans are an offshoot of the Trill?”
“Let’s find out,” Gard said, then restarted the playback.
Ditrel resumed speaking, her gaze intense and locked directly on the visual pickup in front of her. “For millennia, the joined ruling class has covered up the fact that the parasites originated on ancient Kurl, during a long-suppressed prehistoric era of early Trill interstellar expansion.”
“‘Prehistoric,’” Dax repeated.
Julian shrugged and spoke in a stage whisper. “I suppose any previously unrevealed era of ancient Trill space colonization would have to be prehistoric, by definition. Of course, that begs the question of how anyone could possibly know about it today.”
“She mentioned old records of archaeological digs,” Dax said. “Maybe someone discovered—”
Cyl made a shushing noise as the woman on the screen continued. Dax immediately stopped speaking, and Julian looked as though he wanted to bite off a sharp reply to the general before subsiding into silence.
“ . . . cording to the documents now in our possession, five thousand years ago, Trill colonists formed an exclusive society on Kurl in which everyone was joined to a symbiont. There was no ‘Great Unjoined’ underclass among these people. The Kurlans therefore fancied that their ‘joined-only’ civilization would be better than that of the homeworld, where the unjoined have always been in the majority.
“But this joined-only paradise failed. The humanoids of the Kurl colony used genetic engineering techniques on the symbionts, perhaps intent on increasing the symbiont population on their planet, or improving the rapport between host and symbiont. Instead, the Kurlans killed themselves off and released the parasites into an unsuspecting universe.
“The very same parasites that have been so determined to destroy us all—and whose genetic profiles match the few hundred thousand slugs who now quietly rule this world from the abdomens of their pampered and privileged humanoid slaves.”
Ditrel paused in an apparent effort to collect her thoughts. Then she fixed her intense gray gaze back at eye level. “The neo-Purist movement calls upon President Maz and the Trill Senate to stop trying to hide the truth about our world’s past. To stop perpetuating the lies and secrecies that have now begun to engulf other worlds besides our own. To stop concealing the connection between the symbionts and the parasites, which has only left us vulnerable to the parasites’ ancient vendetta.”
She’s talking about the hijacking of the Gryphon, Dax realized. She knew that one of the parasites nearly succeeded in using the Akira-class starship to attack Trill, and that Kira was the main reason the attack had failed.
“Be warned: We will not permit any such thing to happen to our world again. We will stand vigilantly against the parasites and their so-called symbiont cousins. We will allow neither the joined nor the creatures who control them to lead us to destruction. In the defense of our world, we are prepared to take drastic measures.”
The screen went dark then, and Dax found herself standing in silence, considering the neo-Purist’s surprising revelations. Julian, Cyl, and Gard stood by, looking equally subdued and thoughtful.
“Do you suppose there’s any truth to this?” Julian asked, finally breaking the quiet.
“The neo-Purists obviously know about the link between the parasites and Kurl,” Dax said. “And that’s something we’ve verified. Maybe there’s something to the rest of their story as well.” She truly didn’t want to believe that the Trill government would conceal information of such vital importance to the homeworld’s defense against the parasites. But she had too much firsthand experience with Trill cover-ups to dismiss the idea out of hand.
“But the time line doesn’t add up,” Julian insisted. “The naiskos fragment we found is twelve thousand years old. If the Trill colonized Kurl five thousand years ago, how could an artifact more than twice as old as the colony come from there, unless—” Julian stopped, his eyes narrowing.
“What?” Dax said.
“The naiskos were never native to Kurl,” he said slowly. “They were Trill artifacts all along. Don’t you see? All our assumptions about the age of the Kurl civilization were false, because so many of the artifacts we assumed were native to the planet were actually brought to Kurl by the colonists as treasures, works of art, keepsakes. They were imported!”
“Even assuming that’s true,” Gard said, “It makes me wonder how the neo-Purists came to their conclusions.”
“It’s pretty clear the radicals have infiltrated the government,” Cyl reiterated. “Perhaps they’ve also found their way into some long-forgotten section of the classified archives.”
“Forgotten?” Julian asked. “I thought the Trill revered and collected memories.”
“We do,” said Cyl. “But any society that collects and preserves its cultural and personal memories long enough can begin losing track of them. We Trill are no exception.”
Though Dax had never spent much time considering the matter, she had to concede that Cyl was right; she knew that the physical records of Trill history occupied uncounted kilometers of winding catacombs beneath Leran Manev and other Trill metroplexes. How difficult would it be to misplace whole epochs of deep time?
“But there must be important gaps in the radicals’ knowledge,” Julian was saying to Cyl. “Otherwise, I think they might have told us more. For instance, more of the details of the Kurlans’ alleged creation of the parasites. And why the government would want the story covered up in the first place.”
“It seems likelier that the radicals have taken the sketchy Kurl information they gleaned from this afternoon’s testimony and created embellishments out of whole cloth,” Gard suggested. “If they’re capable of planting bombs, they’re certainly capable of planting lies and propaganda.”
“Maybe,” Cyl said, though he didn’t appear entirely convinced. “But if part of their story checks out, then it’s at least possible that they’ve stumbled onto information that even you and I aren’t aware of. And if that’s true, things may be even worse than we thought.”
Dax was inclined to agree. Audrid’s memories nagged at the back of her brain, telling her there was more to this mystery than even the neo-Purists suspected.
Before leaving Trill forever, Captain Christopher Pike was speaking softly yet insistently to Audrid. “Your people’s secret, Doctor Dax. Is it that important? Was it worth all of those lives?”
Audrid silently considered everyone who had died as a result of the parasite’s hate-filled rampage. Chin, Milton, and Juarez from the Tereshkova.
And poor Jayvin.
Tears came, and sobs wracked her shoulders. Pike waited patiently for the waves of misery to subside.
“I don’t know,” Audrid said after she finally recovered her voice.
“So we have to find out what the truth really is,” Cyl was saying, the steel in his voice dragging Dax roughly back to the here and now. “That’s really the root of our problem with these radicals.”
Gard had crossed to one of the windows. Several stories below, the crowd and the police were engaged in violent clashes, masses of people spontaneously forming eddies and whirlpools of panic-fueled Brownian motion. Dax saw the flashes of police phaser fire. Bodies tumbled to the street, where they were trampled by panicked feet, either advancing or retreating. Though the police weapons were no doubt set on stun, people were going to die anyway.
And all for want of a little bit of hard truth, and equal footing in our society, Dax thought, feeling hot tears begin to sting her eyes.
“That is our main problem with these radicals,” Gard said, indicating the riot. “Putting a stop to the violence. Not plowing through some antediluvian archive looking for something that might not even be there.”
“I agree complet
ely,” Julian said to Gard. He sounded impatient to get busy doing something. Beginning to experience some restlessness herself, Dax didn’t blame him a bit for feeling that way.
“If we don’t get to the bottom of this Kurl business soon, that might just prove unstoppable,” said Cyl. He, too, gestured toward the violent tableau outside.
Dax thought all three of them were right. Though she wished she could quell the riot simply by wading into the thick of it, she knew better. The match had been lit and the fire was already burning bright and hot. They had to find a way to snuff it out without inadvertently fanning the flames—or being consumed by them.
“I think we might have a shortcut to some of the oldest information about Kurl,” Dax said before she realized the words had slipped out. Looking into Cyl’s eyes, she saw a glimmer of understanding there. The ghost of little Neema’s smile lingered at the corners of his mouth.
“The Guardians of Mak’ala,” he said.
* * *
Bashir could hardly believe what he was hearing. Just outside the building, people were being injured, perhaps even killed. Now hardly seemed an appropriate time to stop by the underground breeding pools merely to chat with the symbionts’ unjoined humanoid caretakers.
Ezri and Cyl were already crossing to the door. “I’ll take the runabout straight to Mak’ala,” Ezri said over her shoulder. “Julian, I want you to report to the government’s Emergency Response Med-Center and assist with the injured.”
He nodded, but still felt completely confused about what they were doing. “Of course. But why make the trip to Mak’ala now? Are the symbiont pools in any direct danger from the rioters?”
Ezri and the general paused in the doorway. “There are large numbers of protesters massed outside the caves,” Cyl said. “But the additional security troops I deployed earlier today seem to be discouraging any untoward activity. So far, that is.”
“Then why go there now?” Gard asked, repeating Bashir’s question.
