“Contact them. Tell them they have to power down and remain on the surface.”
The president laughed, a hard, braying sound. “You do not command here.”
“Captain, I’m reading several vessels leaving the surface,” said the science officer, alarmed. “They all read as transluminal configurations.”
The captain turned and addressed Dax directly. “Private Memh, can you target all four of them simultaneously?”
Somehow, Dax knew that she could. Such things seemed to be Memh’s specialty. “Yes, Captain.”
Approximately two and a half minutes later, nothing remained of any of the other ships save orbiting fragments of superheated metallic debris.
And dozens of Kurlan Trill, both humanoids and symbionts, were dead. Dax felt physically ill, but remained at her—at Memh’s—post.
“They can still launch a lot more ships, Captain,” the science officer said, breaking the dolorous silence that had enveloped the control center. “We can’t possibly chase down every last one of them.”
“We might,” the captain said. She clearly did not like the direction the conversation was taking. Neither did Dax.
The science officer was almost in tears, but he held his ground admirably nevertheless. Like everyone else here, he was a creature of duty. “We can’t rely on that, Captain. The risk to Trill is too great.”
The captain settled back in her chair, staring straight ahead quietly. “You’re right, Mister Lev,” she finally said at length. “Womb help us all, you’re right.”
Turning her chair until she once again faced Dax, the captain said, “Private Memh, deploy the biogenics, along with the incendiaries.”
Dax was surprised at how little she hesitated after hearing that order. Memh must have anticipated the very real possibility of having to do this. Perhaps it had become second nature to her.
After Dax entered three brief commands into her board, a console light’s telltale flash confirmed that the network of satellites had left the ship’s belly, the individual pulse launchers already well on their way to their optimal firing positions.
Fourteen minutes later, the first of the rhythmic flashes appeared on the forward screen. First, the spaceports and landing fields erupted in orange flames that consumed hangars, terminals, spacecraft, and people indiscriminately. Moments later, the flames were eclipsed by multiple nimbuses of dazzling golden-white light as the biogenic detonations struck each city in turn. The individual pulses faded almost as quickly as they had registered on everyone’s retinas, though the effects were actually still propagating throughout the entire Kurlan biosphere.
There would be no more ships launched from anywhere on Kurl. Though the cities were largely intact, no one on the surface would now be in any condition to pilot a vessel, even if the planet’s spaceports hadn’t been leveled. Within a few short hours, every trace of the virus would be gone. All four million or so of the planet’s inhabitants would be dead as well, thanks to a biogenic weapon that no one on either Trill or Kurl had expected ever to be put to use.
The sheer horror of what she had just witnessed made Dax want to scream. But all she could do was look at the forward viewer with a disciplined gaze, her larynx all but paralyzed. That’s how nightmares go, she told herself.
But she knew this was no nightmare. She understood on some fundamental level that what she had just witnessed was absolutely real. Trill’s penchant for secrecy had evidently begun here, some five millennia in the past, during a lost age. Kurl had been sacrificed in an attempt to contain a lethal disease and prevent it from spreading to Trill—just as a host is sometimes sacrificed to save an ailing symbiont.
No wonder the parasites hate us, Dax thought. We created them, then we tried to wipe them out. Thousands of years later, the children of the survivors came back looking to even the score.
She couldn’t really say she blamed them for feeling that way. And she had to marvel at the intensity and longevity of the creatures’ hatred; it had evidently outlasted the virus that had brought it into being in the first place.
More images, obviously gleaned from still other, later memories, followed in rapid succession: Back on Trill, important, influential people held closed-door meetings. They made clandestine decisions, as important, influential people were often wont to do.
Cover stories were crafted, for no one in the circles of power wanted it known that the benign Trill symbionts could be perverted into such a terrible menace—a menace whose destruction had required nothing less than an act of mass murder to avert.
The cover-up took on a momentum of its own. Overly talkative military officers and politicians died under mysterious circumstances. Computer files were erased. Paper documents were shredded, except for a few that had been hidden away without official sanction, then ultimately lost in the ever-expanding records-storage catacombs beneath Leran Manev.
Trill turned inward, withdrawing from space, isolating itself, eventually abandoning space travel and alien contact until such knowledge was all but purged from its collective memory. Concealing the symbionts and Trill symbiosis from outsiders, they reasoned, might help keep the ghosts of Kurl from rattling their chains. The planet’s extreme distance from Trill took care of the rest.
Kurl was effectively buried.
The usual ebb and flow of history followed as the centuries piled up like drifts of snow over the Tenaran permafrost. Governments, nations, languages, and whole Trill societies rose and fell over the next five millennia. Even Trill’s first period of interstellar colonization became lost to antiquity, though by rights it should have been revered as a golden age, a time when the Trill people had reached across the stars.
But it wasn’t. Kurl was not only buried, it was forgotten.
Almost.
Dax knew now that this terrible secret had to be part of the full accounting of Trill’s deliberately buried past that the neo-Purists were demanding. She wondered how the radicals—along with their sympathizers and the networks of discontented unjoined who were protesting all over the planet—would react to the revelation of ancient Trill’s shameful act of genocide.
Julian’s parting words echoed in Dax’s mind: “Suppose you discover some entirely new unknown horror from your people’s past. What will you do then?”
She had absolutely no idea.
Dax suddenly became aware of the physical world once again. She was sweltering inside a standard Starfleet environmental suit, floating limply before what might well be the oldest symbiont on the entire Trill homeworld. The smaller caretaker symbiont cut a slow, repetitive circle in the water beside her, evidently the symbiont equivalent of nervous pacing.
Dax’s exhausting mnemonic journey was at an end. She was glad; she felt spent, both physically and emotionally.
<
Dax nodded, though she knew the creature couldn’t see the gesture. “Yes. In fact, I think one of the Annuated took me straight to what I needed to know.”
<
“Thanks. I think.” Dax felt too fatigued to react to the caretaker’s barb, if that’s what it was.
<
“They killed four million people, then covered it up,” Dax said sharply, wondering if she was channeling Curzon’s temper again, her fatigue notwithstanding. “That’s a little hard for me to write off as a mere youthful indiscretion.”
<
Before Dax could compose a rejoinder, the caretaker made an impatient noise and added, <
Dax thought that was a good idea. Why stay down here and argue? Then she wondered how she was going to substantiate what she had learned here. After all, it wasn’t as though these elder symbionts had given her an isolinear chip filled with information that could be objectively examined. On the other hand, nobody would have time to study any such document anyway. Events had already begun moving rather quickly before she and Cyl had come to Mak’ala; she could only imagine what was going on now in the streets of Trill’s cities.
Dax suddenly noticed that the whine of her suit’s over-strained heat exchangers had risen about half an octave in pitch, which wasn’t a good sign. But at least she had what she’d come for. Now she just had to get back to the surface to report her findings to Julian, Cyl, and Gard. Together, the four of them would figure out just what to do with her discoveries. And how to substantiate them if necessary, perhaps with the help of the Guardians.
Then she heard a sharp click, coming from somewhere inside her suit. The whine of the heat exchangers ceased at once, and the acrid tang of ozone assaulted her nostrils. A key circuit or relay had probably burned out, and there was no way to change it down here, or even to reach it.
A glance at her sensor display confirmed the worst. Her suit couldn’t sustain life support for even a fraction of the time it would take for her to swim back to the surface. Soon, she would literally cook inside her own environmental suit. And she still couldn’t call Cyl for a rescue. This excursion and the revelations she had experienced had all been in vain.
Clenching her burned hand into a fist, she decided that this was a perfect occasion for one of Curzon’s highly inventive curses.
12
“What do you mean no one has been able to find President Maz?” Gard yelled into his communicator as he dashed down the corridor.
“Exactly what I said, Mister Gard,” Colonel Rianu said, her voice sounding slightly tinny as it issued from the comm device’s small speaker. “We’re having more and more communications blackouts. We lost contact with the president’s contingent five minutes ago.”
“Was she warned about the bomb threats? Is she en route to one of the emergency bunkers?” As Gard neared the turbolift, he held his phaser in his free hand, his finger hovering over the triggering button just in case anyone else had infiltrated the Senate Tower.
“We tried,” Rianu said. “We think Commander Grekel heard our warnings before we were cut off. We—Hold on.”
Gard saw the colonel’s face turn from the tiny monitor, and heard her conversing in low tones with her subordinates. Her brows knitted in anger as she turned back to him.
“Two search teams have found additional bombs in the vicinity. One was in the Najana Library, and another one was near the shuttle docking station on Maran Avenue. They’re attempting to disarm them now.”
Gard pressed the button for the turbolift. “Do we know what kind of bombs they are?”
“Negative,” Rianu said, shaking her head, her gaze focused off-screen. “The scans have been inconclusive so far.” She paused and listened for a bit. “I’m told there are traces of some kind of radiation, but we can’t analyze it on the spot. We’re going to try beaming them out as soon as we can get site-to-site transporter stanchions in place.”
The turbolift doors opened, and Gard prepared to step inside. “I suspect more of these devices have been planted around Leran Manev. Until we know what they can do, it might be best to evacuate as many people as possible from the central districts. We should get key officials to radiation-shielded facilities as quickly as possible.”
Colonel Rianu’s reply was lost in a sudden haze of static.
Jirin Tambor checked his chronometer for the eighteenth time in the last few minutes. The pain suppressants in his system were doing a good job of keeping him from noticing the progress of the bloodborne malignancy that was attacking his heart muscle, consuming him layer by layer from the inside. But they did little to quell the nervousness and trepidation he was feeling at the moment.
He paced in front of the neurogenic device quietly, careful not to let his footfalls be heard. Though the building was closed to the public for the night, it was still possible that someone might happen upon him in time to stop what he was doing. The other members of his cell had already left. He didn’t blame them; he had chosen to stay behind.
My life is over anyhow. Weeks or days or minutes. It doesn’t matter now. He had already said good-bye to all of his friends and what family he had left. Most of his family would no longer communicate with him, ever since he had told them he was joining the neo-Purist movement. They, too, were members of the unjoined majority, but had always appeared content with their lives despite the chronic lack of opportunity Tambor now saw as their unjust lot. They hadn’t even been permitted the where-withal to earn university degrees. Given that, why couldn’t more people see what was so glaringly obvious?
“Why involve yourself in all this protest?” his mother had asked him. “What good does it do you to provoke the government? The joined aren’t purposely discriminating against us. You’ve just chosen to interpret every bit of bad luck in the worst possible way.”
But Tambor knew better. His family knew he was sick, but not how sick. They didn’t know what he had learned from his doctors, one of whom had broken a sacred vow to tell him the truth. His chances of survival would be greatly increased if he were joined. A symbiont living in his abdomen could, at least potentially, stop the cancer that was eating him alive. The doctor had tried to backpedal, saying that even joining was no guarantee of recovery. But he couldn’t hide the fact that the joined almost never suffered from this particular condition. And on those rare occasions when they did, no expense seemed to be spared in restoring them to health. Medicines and radiation treatments had already failed Tambor; he knew with bedrock certainty that the slugs would have saved him.
But the Symbiosis Commission would not grant him the right to join, even as an emergency measure to save his life. They had repeatedly denied his requests, until he had exhausted every avenue of appeal.
The malignancy within him was consuming more than his organs; it had removed his inhibitions, chilling a lifetime of carefully observed morality into a glacier of cold rage. Increasingly over the past year, he had noticed the inequities practiced by his government, by the university he attended, and even by the people on the streets. Every advantage possible in life seemed to flow effortlessly toward his world’s charmed few: the joined.
Then he found the neo-Purist movement, and the arguments of its members made sense. As they uncovered more and more hints about Trill’s history, and the past horrors those ancient records had hinted at, he came to understand that something radical would have to be done to right his world’s ingrained wrongs.
Tambor’s cell had received a great deal of information—including rudimentary plans for the neurogenic bombs—from a neo-Purist operative within the government archives. Tambor believed implicitly, as did his fellow revolutionaries, the records claiming that similar neurogenic devices had been used before, in the depths of Trill’s all-but-forgotten past.
And now they will be used again.
Tambor knew his family would be safe, since none of his relatives lived anywhere near the bomb sites. Everyone he cared about would be safe. The bombs were supposed to have little effect upon unjoined persons anyway, except for those unlucky enough to be at extremely close range when the devices detonated. Tambor had decided to take luck out of the equation entirely by remaining at ground zero until the clock ran out.
He checked his chronometer again, then set his hand phaser down on the floor.
Even if somebody were to try to stop me now, there wouldn’t be any time for a fire fight.
Julian Bash
ir stumbled into the intake room at Manev Central Hospital, holding his tunic sleeve up to his nose to stanch the blood flow.
The place was overflowing with people, though most of them appeared to have suffered relatively minor injuries. The nurses and trauma teams seemed to be doing their best to divide people into groups depending on their needs, ushering the worst cases down the hallways toward what he assumed were medical alcoves and emergency treatment facilities.
He started to approach one of the nurses, then felt woozy. Nearby, he noticed a just-vacated chair, and he moved toward it, sitting down heavily.
Just breathe, Julian. You can’t do any good for anyone else in this condition. He closed his eyes for just a moment.
He heard a noise then, and opened his eyes, focusing as a thin nurse stepped in front of him. “Sir, can you hear me?”
Bashir was perplexed by the question. “Of course I can hear you. I was just mugged, but I’m going to be fine. I’m a doctor—”
She crouched beside him, pulling gauze and bandages out of the medkit that was slung over her shoulder. “You were unconscious, sir. Let me see that.”
Unconscious? Bashir didn’t recall having passed out. But then how could he?
“The good news is, I think you look to be in worse shape than you really are,” the nurse said, smiling grimly as she used a white cloth to wipe away some of the caked blood under his nose.
She dabbed an acrid-smelling ointment under his eye. “Thanks for the inspiration,” he said, wincing as the ointment stung him. “You’ve got a great bedside manner.”
“We’re a bit busy here, as you can see,” she said. “No time to be excessively sweet.” She removed a hypospray and tapped a combination of codes into it as he watched.
As she touched the hypo to his neck, he felt a surge of energy. Sakarnel, he thought. Not what I’d have used, but it’ll get me back on my feet. “I’m a doctor with Starfleet. I can help you here.”
“That was just what I was thinking,” she said. “I recognized the uniform.” She pointed to his face. “None of your injuries are life-threatening, but you’ll probably have some bruises for a few days.”
Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine® Volume Two Page 15