by Andy Mangels
Each of these incoherent madhouse cries made Bashir wonder whether the host or the symbiont was screaming.
“We’ve waited long enough,” Dr. Torvin was saying, shaking his balding head sadly as they moved through the crowded ward, surveying the hapless patients.
Bashir’s stomach went into free fall as he walked beside the tall, gangly Trill physician. “What are you saying, Doctor?”
Torvin scowled as he brought the peripatetic appraisal of the ward to a halt. “I think you know what I’m saying, Doctor Bashir. We have to begin the wholesale extraction of the symbionts carried by these hosts, immediately. If we wait much longer, it may be too late.”
“Doctor Torvin, if we remove the symbionts, these people will die, just like the others. We can’t go on sacrificing people this way.”
“We have no better options,” Torvin said, shaking his head. “You’ve seen that. Sometimes a host must be sacrificed so that a symbiont can live on.”
“But not if an alternative exists. If we could find some record of Bethan Roa’s work on nonlethal symbiosis dissolution, we could at least—”
“Roa again,” Torvin interrupted, his frown taking on more ferocity since the last time Bashir had tried to discuss this subject with him. “I thought we’d been through all this before, Doctor. I’ve already explained to you that no such thing exists.”
Bashir had finally had enough of Trill denial. “Yes. You have. And I don’t doubt that you’re right, at least as far as Roa’s files are concerned.”
“What are you saying?” Torvin asked guardedly.
“I’m saying that Roa’s work appears to have been the subject of yet another whitewash by the Trill Symbiosis Commission.”
Torvin’s frown gave way to an amalgam of pique and bewilderment. “Why would you say that?”
Bashir tried to tamp down his rising anger, with only limited success. “Because your society is at war with itself at this very moment, apparently as a direct result of your government’s rather checkered history with regard to such things. Because your world’s official database contains no references to Roa’s work—work whose results other Starfleet officers can verify independently. And because the Trill Symbiosis Commission’s joining registry does not reveal the current status of the Roa symbiont.
“Let me speak plainly, Doctor Torvin: I believe that the Commission doesn’t want anyone to interview Roa’s new host, assuming there is one, about Bethan Roa’s symbiosis dissolution serum.”
Torvin gestured broadly at the dozens of people who lay suffering all about the small, curtained-off section of the room. His expression took on a desperate cast. “A drug that would allow us to remove symbionts for radiation treatments without killing these people would be a great boon, I should think. We’re not monsters, Doctor Bashir. If such a thing really did exist, then why would anyone want to see it suppressed?”
Based on Torvin’s reaction, Bashir was now willing to bet that the Trill doctor wasn’t a direct participant in any Symbiosis Commission cover-up of the Roa formula. In Bashir’s eyes, Torvin genuinely did not seem to be a political animal.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been duped and manipulated by others who were highly motivated to bury Roa’s work, and keep it buried.
Bashir held up a hand in a gesture of truce. “Doctor Torvin, imagine what might happen if it became known that symbiosis could be undertaken on a temporary basis. That the bond between symbiont and host could be established, then broken, then established again just as easily with a new host. The symbiont population is relatively small as it is, They would become a sought-after black-market commodity if Roa’s drug were to become common knowledge.”
Torvin looked horrified for a long moment, then began nodding slowly. He actually seemed to be considering alternatives to simply letting more hosts die, giving Bashir a surge of renewed hope.
Then the Trill physician sighed, looking downcast and shaking his silver-fringed head yet again. “Unfortunately, when the Commission decides to bury something, it tends to stay buried.”
Bashir thought bitterly of the unrest that had spilled onto the streets of Leran Manev and so many other Trill cities prior to the bombings. And the secrecy that had caused it all in the first place.
Then a sudden inspiration seized Bashir’s imagination. “Not always, Doctor Torvin.” He turned toward the main section of the triage center, intent on finding the nearest computer terminal.
More perplexed than ever, Torvin took a step toward him. “Doctor Bashir! Where are you going?”
Bashir paused at the curtain that separated the makeshift “joined ward” from the rest of the triage center. “Can you keep these hosts and their symbionts joined and alive for, say, another hour without endangering the symbionts?”
“Perhaps, at least with some of them. But the sooner we remove the symbionts, the better their chances for survival.”
Bashir smiled, his mind already racing. “Then please hold off for as long as you can.”
He left the ward at a run.
* * *
Bashir focused his attention on the computer terminal before him, tuning out the shrieks and screams of the dying as best he could.
As in his previous round of computer queries, no record remained of any relevant pharmacological work by anyone named Bethan Roa. Reasoning that Roa’s serum would have been present in trace amounts in his symbiont’s neural fluids, Bashir accessed the database of Gheryzan Hospital. He knew that the state-of-the-art facility’s symbiont trauma center had treated the Roa symbiont after Jadzia Dax’s sister Ziranne had rescued it from a ring of symbiont thieves. Working quickly, he searched for the symbiont’s confidential medical records. As he navigated through the database, he began making plans to crack Roa’s files open, recalling a few “hacks” he had learned from his holoprogrammer friend Felix.
Damn. Bashir’s heart sank. Whatever medical records Gheryzon Hospital might have had on the Roa symbiont had apparently been either deleted or sealed. The Commission had been thorough indeed in its cover-up—a whitewash for which he now felt partly responsible. I should have demanded that the Commission allow me to study Roa’s formula five years ago. People are dying because I thought it better to let them keep their damned secrets.
He sat in silence for perhaps a minute, despair threatening to overwhelm him.
Then it occurred to him that Roa’s formula would also have been present in at least one other place.
His hands moving with preternatural speed, he made a second query.
A few moments later, a jubilant grin spread across his face.
* * *
Torvin waited as long as he felt he could. But less than twenty minutes after Dr. Bashir had left the room, four of the afflicted joined Trills in Ward C suddenly took an abrupt turn for the worse. With the assistance of a trio of other surgeons and several medical technicians and nurses, Torvin removed a quartet of radiation-injured symbionts from their convulsing, screaming hosts. Although Torvin was trained to maintain an emotional distance from his patients, the sight was almost too horrible to behold.
Two of these hosts, both of them males, died with what Torvin could only regard under the circumstances as almost merciful swiftness. The third, an elderly woman, hung on for nearly ten minutes, shrieking in agony until the very end. Torvin pronounced the fourth host, a comatose young woman who had never regained consciousness, dead not six minutes later.
One of the dying joined patients who lay restrained on a nearby table suddenly screamed. The haggard middle-aged woman’s eyes were wide open, gray-clouded and sightless. Her limbs strained against their restraints as she began to convulse vigorously enough to break her own bones. Torvin took a quick step backward, then directed a pair of med-techs to prepare to remove her symbiont as well.
A scant two minutes later, Torvin held a laser exoscalpel over the struggling woman’s bare abdomen, preparing to begin the extraction process.
“Stop!” barked a voice from be
hind Torvin. It startled him, almost making him drop the scalpel.
He turned angrily toward the source of the sound, only to be greeted by an incongruously ebullient Dr. Bashir. The human physician was holding up a loaded hypospray as though for inspection.
“I’ve reconstructed Bethan Roa’s formula,” he said.
Torvin felt his eyes narrowing involuntarily. He couldn’t afford to permit himself to believe that it might be true. He realized for the first time that he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Bashir might actually succeed in his quest.
“Where did you find it?” was all Torvin could think of to say.
“Roa wasn’t the only symbiont whose tissues would have carried traces of the formula,” Bashir said quickly, his words tumbling out in a rush. “It was also present in Duhan Vos’s medical records. Apparently, the Commission opted merely to seal the records of his admission to Gheryzan Hospital rather than to delete them altogether.”
Torvin’s eyebrows shot skyward, and he noticed that several nearby nurses and medics had paused to stare. This was not a conversation he wanted to have in front of them. He felt his skin redden with anger at the violation of his fellow commissioner’s confidential records. And though he was curious about exactly how the Starfleet doctor had managed to do such a thing, he decided the question was moot. The human obviously possessed considerable talent in fields other than medicine, and the deed had already been done.
“You had no right to break into Vos’s files,” Torvin said, suddenly realizing he was gripping his exoscalpel almost tightly enough to shatter it.
The human’s smile gave way to a look of quiet determination. “You may, of course, feel free to file an official protest with Starfleet Command. In the meantime, we have lives to save.” He approached the patient who still lay restrained and convulsing on the table.
Torvin stepped into his path, raising the scalpel in a gesture of warning. It occurred to him only then that its glowing orange blade was still active. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I simply can’t allow you to put this woman’s symbiont at risk with an experimental procedure.”
Bashir took another step forward, as though daring Torvin to use the scalpel as a weapon. The hand that carried the hypospray didn’t waver. But then neither did Torvin’s scalpel.
Torvin began to repeat himself. “Doctor Bashir, I’m afraid I can’t permit you to—”
Moving more quickly than Torvin thought possible, Bashir weaved around him, evading not only the scalpel but also the grasp of a burly male med-tech who had evidently tried to run interference for Torvin.
With a loud hiss, Bashir’s hypo deposited its contents directly into the convulsing woman’s abdominal pouch. Cursing, the med-tech grabbed Bashir in a wrestler’s hold and began dragging him bodily toward the door. Though the human doctor was a good deal smaller than the medic, he was clearly determined not to be moved quickly or easily.
Anger seared Torvin’s breast. Though he shared Bashir’s compassion for the unfortunate hosts who were losing their lives, such blatant interference with his medical practice simply couldn’t be tolerated. “You’d better believe I’ll be telling your superiors about this, Doctor Bashir. Your Starfleet career is finished.”
“Maybe,” Bashir said, still struggling against the med-tech’s grip. “But that hardly seems as important as all the lives you’re prepared to sacrifice merely for expediency’s sake.” He gestured with his head toward the woman who lay on the table. Torvin spared a glance at her.
And noticed that she had stopped convulsing. His first thought was that Bashir’s unauthorized treatment had killed her. Then he noticed that she was beginning to take deep, regular breaths.
“Let him go,” Torvin said. Bashir fell unceremoniously to the floor.
“I think it’s clear that you don’t want these hosts to die any more than I do, Doctor Torvin,” Bashir said, still sprawled on the floor while the med-tech continued eyeing him warily. “I also think you realize that your world’s ‘symbionts first’ ethic is what’s largely to blame for all the upheaval your people have been experiencing lately.”
Torvin quickly examined the woman, his plisagraph reporting that her vital signs now appeared unaccountably stronger. The symbiont still needed to be removed for radiation treatment, of course, but doing so didn’t appear to pose a mortal threat to the host. It was the closest thing to a miracle Torvin had ever seen.
Torvin’s earlier anger at Bashir quickly yielded to a flash of self-loathing. Had his own loyalty to the Symbiosis Commission made him lose sight of what was right and what was wrong? Had he forgotten what it meant to be a doctor? If I had taken the cost of the Commission’s secrecy into account, then perhaps Doctor Renhol would still be alive.
Within seconds his self-disgust was eclipsed by hope. Hope that Bashir’s wild idea might actually work on the other patients who lay around the room, dying.
Torvin approached Bashir. Extending a long, wiry arm, he helped the human doctor back to his feet. Warm tears suddenly stung Torvin’s eyes; he realized he had never before been so delighted at having been proved wrong.
“I think you and I have a great deal of work ahead of us, Doctor,” Torvin said. “Don’t you agree?”
Grinning, the human held up his now-empty hypospray. “Give me a few minutes with one of your pharmaceutical replicators. And alert your nurses and medics to get ready to start distributing the drug immediately.”
15
“Is there another way to the surface?” Ezri Dax asked.
<
“My equipment has malfunctioned. The pressure down here has put too much strain on it.” Dax felt awash in sweat as her environmental suit’s temperature quickly and steadily climbed. She did her best not to let the onset of panic affect her respiration or heart rate; there was nothing to be gained by wasting her few remaining life-support resources, even if she was slowly cooking inside her suit.
<
There was no point trying to hold anything back from the telepathic creature, Dax realized. “That’s a pretty fair observation.”
<
“Right again.”
The caretaker symbiont went silent for a protracted moment before speaking again inside Dax’s mind. <>
Of course, Dax thought with a growing sense of resignation. This creature has to tend to these giant superslugs. They probably need constant care, so it can’t just abandon them. Not even to return me to the surface.
But she couldn’t simply give up. Aloud, she said, “If I don’t get back safely, the Annuated will have shared their memories with me in vain. I’ll die down here, along with my symbiont. And this entire mission will have been an utter waste.”
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. <
