by Andy Mangels
“You should be able to walk in a few minutes,” Bashir said, putting the hypo back into his kit.
“Have the bombs gone off yet?” the woman asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“What did she say?” Asal asked sharply, moving in closer.
Bashir felt his blood chill. “The bombs?”
“I heard some people talking about bombs while I was at the library,” the woman said, distress evident on her face. “That’s why I tried to get my children out of there.”
“Why didn’t you inform anyone?” Asal asked.
“She tried to, but the police wouldn’t listen,” the little girl said. “They sprayed the gas on us right after that.”
“I’ve got to report this,” Asal said, tapping her wrist comm unit.
“How many bombs were there?” Bashir asked. “And did you hear where they were?”
“No,” the woman said. “They just said ‘bombs.’ And that the joined would be sorry when they went off.”
“I can’t get a signal here,” Asal said. “I’ve got to get out and warn the other units. Just in case there’s anything to this.”
Bashir’s mind whirled as he stood. He pulled Asal aside and whispered. “I’m almost certain there is. We already disabled one bomb, in the Senate Tower.”
“I’d better go,” Asal said emphatically, evidently taking him at his word. “The hospital is that way,” she said, pointing. “You should be able to get there from here without a lot of trouble.”
“Good luck,” Bashir murmured as Asal began running back in the direction from which they had come.
He crouched again, and performed another quick scan of the boy and his mother with the tricorder. “You should be able to walk in a few minutes. I’d hurry home as soon as possible if I were you. And thank you for the information.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, and the boy and girl both immediately echoed her grateful sentiment.
Bashir sprinted down the alley, turned a corner, and exited onto a street. Ahead, he could barely make out one of the emergency entrances to Manev Central Hospital, though the street was clogged with hovercars and limping, wounded, or angry people. Limned in the vehicle headlights and overhead street lamps, a handful of police were attempting to direct the traffic, unsuccessfully.
Before attempting to dash across the street and into the nearest hospital entry foyer, Bashir found a public comm terminal on the opposite side of the boulevard. He swiftly entered commands into its flat touchscreen. Gard’s face appeared on the small screen a moment later.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” Gard said, an expression of studied patience on his face.
“I’ve just learned some potentially important information, Mister Gard. One of the people in the crowd overheard somebody talking about several more bombs.”
“‘Several’?”
Bashir nodded. “The woman who overheard this was at the Najana Library. She said that the bombs were somehow targeted specifically at the joined.”
Gard frowned. “Thank you, Doctor. Is there anything else?”
“I think we should call for additional help from Starfleet. This situation is quickly getting out of hand.” Bashir glanced up to see a large group of rowdy-looking teens moving quickly out of the darkness toward him. All of them were dressed in baggy, dark clothing, and they seemed to have been roughed up in the protests.
“I suspect President Maz won’t support that idea,” Gard said, shaking his head. “But I promise to pass it along when I find her.”
Bashir wondered if he heard a hint of derision in Gard’s voice. “Can you patch me through to Lieutenant Dax?” Bashir asked, turning slightly and stepping back against the wall to allow the group of teens to pass.
“Not now. I’ve got larger concerns,” Gard said. Then the screen went blank.
“Of all the—” Bashir was about to curse Gard, when a fist connected with his jaw, knocking him back against the wall. Before he could react, he felt a second fist strike his midsection, while another blow glanced off his ear.
Dazed, he was barely aware that the teens were grabbing his medical kit and tricorder. Red stars burst across his vision after one of them kicked him in the ribs. He doubled over in pain, coughing and spraying blood onto the sidewalk.
Barely conscious, Bashir heard the gang members laughing as they ran away, melting back into the shadows.
9
“Of course I’ve questioned it,” Dax said. “Even if my symbiont hadn’t lived through nine hosts, two of us have been Starfleet officers, and one of us was a Federation diplomat. It’s inevitable that we’d have a wider view of things than most. That we’d question the status quo more.” She was sitting behind the controls of the Rio Grande, one hand guiding the vessel on a swift suborbital trajectory over the Ganses Peninsula toward the Caves of Mak’ala. Her other hand, the one that still sported an angry red phaser burn, absent-mindedly played with the fragment from the Kurlan naiskos. The pain in her hand was tolerable, though she wished she’d taken a moment to treat it with a dermal regenerator before beaming the runabout’s medical equipment down to Julian.
“So what makes you different from the protesters?” Cyl asked, sitting next to her. He appeared more relaxed than he had back in Talris’s office. But Dax knew he was a military general, and therefore a soldier. She surmised that he was really as tense as she was, if not more so.
“Questioning and exploring aren’t quite the same as anarchy and outright defiance of authority,” she said, a touch of defensiveness rising within her. She was reminded briefly of Curzon’s wry observation that anarchy is better than no government at all.
Cyl nodded, his mouth forming a small smile. “So it’s a matter of degree, not necessarily a question of the goal. And you would never defy the authority of accepted morality by say . . . reassociation?”
Dax’s eyes narrowed as her mind flashed back to the brief time that Jadzia Dax had met Torias Dax’s previous wife, Nilani Kahn, whose symbiont was then hosted in the body of Dr. Lenara Kahn. Dax had been willing to break the taboo forbidding reassociation between joined Trills who had been intimate with one another during previous lives. Kahn, however, decided ultimately not to pursue their renewed relationship.
“Point taken,” Dax said after a moment of reflection. “But it sounds to me that you’re either finding reasons to excuse the actions of these neo-Purists, or you’re painting anyone who disobeys the rules with the same broad brush you’d use on the radical fringe.”
Cyl’s smile widened. “I’m doing neither, Ezri. Or maybe both. This is a confusing time for Trill, and no matter what comes in the next days and weeks, we are all going to have to reexamine our values and beliefs. Our traditions and laws may be open to change, and we’ll be forced to decide if our society should change, or if we should remain anchored to the past. Evolution itself is about change, after all. Do we allow our society to evolve? And if we examine the mistakes and secrets of our past, how will that affect the evolution of our future?”
Dax checked the course of the runabout on the instrument panel, then looked back over at Cyl. “You’re certainly not Audrid’s little girl Neema any longer. You’ve become quite the warrior-philosopher.”
“The accumulated experiences of six hosts tend to do that sort of thing to a person,” Cyl said. “Not that I need to tell you, Para.”
The word hit Dax harder than she thought it might have in any other context. “Para” had been Neema’s childhood name for her mother, Audrid Dax, lifetimes ago. Now Dax was a part of a twenty-seven-year-old Starfleet officer, and Cyl existed as a fifty-something-year-old military general. The familial bond they had once shared remained strong in Dax’s memory, but the physicality of their current hosts made such recollections feel strange and confusing. Such mnemonic turmoil no doubt accounted, at least in part, for the Trill people’s cultural taboo against reassociation.
Dax looked at the Kurlan fragment she was holding and turned it over in her hands. �
�I don’t regret it, you know. Reassociation, I mean. I don’t regret what happened with Lenara Kahn. Just as I don’t regret my decision to reconnect with my friends on Deep Space 9, or getting reacquainted with you.”
“Maybe not yet,” Cyl said, a wry grin appearing on his face even as his eyes grew sadder and older. “Give it time. I can be quite the tyrant.”
Dax returned the grin. So could Neema.
She looked up at Cyl. “Do you suppose that a part of the taboo against reassociation is to keep the joined from sharing too much of the past? I mean, it seems as though that concept is against everything we’re taught about revering memory and history. Did we decide somewhere along the line that reassociation could spark some kind of . . . atavistic racial recollection of early Trill?” She held up the Kurlan object so that Cyl could see it clearly. “Or of some horrible truth we’ve kept buried deep in our past?”
“Why don’t you ask Audrid?” Cyl said. “True, the Cyl symbiont is older than Dax, but Audrid was the head of the Symbiosis Commission for over fifteen years.” He hesitated, then looked away. “But then, Audrid always excelled at keeping secrets.”
Dax and Cyl had danced around that subject time and time again. How Jayvin Vod, Neema’s father and Audrid’s husband, had been taken over by one of the parasites, in the icy interior of a rogue comet. How Jayvin had been allowed to die because of the irreversible psychic damage the Vod symbiont had suffered. How, in order to keep the existence of the parasites quiet, Audrid had lied to her children about the actual circumstances of Jayvin Vod’s death, thereby estranging Neema from her for years. How Audrid had eventually told Neema the complete truth about her father’s death, including the facts about the parasite, a creature supposedly stricken from Trill’s earliest historical records, buried and forgotten.
More than a hundred years and a lifetime later, the pain of Audrid’s betrayal of her daughter’s trust evidently remained an open wound for Taulin Cyl.
Dax reached out and took Cyl’s hand, squeezing it. He looked at her, his eyes uncharacteristically soft and imploring. “I’m sorry, Neema,” Dax said, her voice taking on Audrid’s measured cadence. “I would give anything to change what happened that day.”
“And that is the difference between us and the powers that we serve,” Cyl said, nodding. “We should not reassociate. We should not remember the bad. We should cover up our sins. That is what the governing body of Trill wants.” He chuckled slightly. “Perhaps neither of us is really very different from the people who are crying out for radical change.”
Dax offered him a grim smile. “There’s that broad brush again. Not everyone crying out for change wants what the neo-Purists want. The neo-Purists aren’t agitating for equal access to symbiosis. Sure, they want to eradicate the boundaries between the joined and the unjoined—but they’re trying to eliminate the joined in order to do that.”
Dax again raised the naiskos fragment. “What do you think the truth really is behind the neo-Purists’ revelations about the parasites? About Kurl?”
Cyl sighed as he took the ceramic shard from Dax and inspected it. “My people have found similar Kurlan artifacts in some of the other parasite lairs we’ve investigated. At first, we thought they might constitute some kind of message, or function as calling cards. But we decided that neither idea made sense. The parasites never expected their lairs to be invaded. Why would they leave messages there for outsiders? Now I suspect they hung on to them as artifacts of memory. Perhaps they revere their history as much as we do ours.”
Cyl handed the shard back, and Dax shuddered involuntarily in response. It was bad enough to have to accept that the symbionts and the parasites shared genetic characteristics. But today’s revelations also suggested that the two species might have deep cultural commonalities as well. Dax was profoundly disturbed by the notion that the Trill might share any behavioral traits whatsoever with such lethal, implacably hostile creatures as the parasites.
She blinked, and in the nanosecond of darkness saw Jayvin Vod deep inside that icy comet, his speech jangled and incoherent and enraged, his eyes cold and murderous. He was no longer her lifetimes-ago husband, but was “the taker of the gist.” Though the creature had worn Jayvin’s form, it was intent on destroying all that was Jayvin Vod. And all that was Trill.
And then her eyes were open again, and she focused on the naiskos fragment in her palm. She squeezed it in her fist and impulsively threw it against the aft bulkhead. It shattered as though shot from a cannon, clattering to the deck in countless tiny shards.
“Feel better now?” Cyl asked after a lengthy silence, one eyebrow raised.
“For now,” Dax said, nodding. A blush of color rose to her cheeks as she realized how silly she must look. A sudden, insistent beeping from the instrument panel seized her attention. Embarrassed by her inattention, she quickly turned to check the cockpit readouts. Then she began guiding the runabout into a rapid controlled descent. Through the front windows, she could see dawn glimmering against the distant white-topped crags of the vast Ayai’leh-hirh mountain range.
“We’re only a few dozen klicks from the caves,” she said, forcing her words into a businesslike cadence.
Cyl settled back in his seat. “So, we’ve managed to voyage nearly halfway around the planet without once discussing the problems in your relationship with the doctor.”
Dax shot him a look that was equal parts surprise and annoyance. “What? I don’t think—I don’t—We aren’t having any problems.”
“Oh.” Cyl stared straight ahead at the rapidly approaching countryside. Its luxuriant carpet of greens and browns was punctuated by jagged gray volcanic buttes, leftovers of the ancient geological processes that had also carved Mak’ala’s network of subterranean caverns.
“What is that supposed to—” Dax was interrupted by a beeping from the console and several flashing lights. “I’m detecting weapons fire at the caves.”
Moments later, the cliffside entrance to the Caves of Mak’ala hove into view through the front windows. Several hundred people had gathered outside. Unpowered hover vehicles lay overturned on the rough ground—one was afire, belching clouds of thick, black smoke—and phaser fire came both from the military troops lined up behind barricades near the caves and from the protesting crowd.
“Why haven’t we gotten any distress calls?” Cyl asked, leaning forward.
Dax punched several buttons on the panel. “Incoming transmissions are being jammed from outside. Looks like the Guardians couldn’t raise anyone over any of the comm channels.”
Cyl breathed a quiet curse. “Can you set the ship’s phasers on stun, as you suggested back at the Senate Tower?”
Dax nodded. “Yes, but the wider the dispersal, the less effect it will have on the crowd. A runabout’s phasers aren’t exactly built for crowd control. It might knock them down for a few minutes, but not for much longer than that. And I can’t guarantee that some of your guards won’t get caught in the beam.”
“Do it,” Cyl said. “In the meantime, we’ve got to call in some reinforcements.” He tapped on the console, evidently well versed in Starfleet communications protocols.
“I don’t know if this message will get through either,” Dax said, nodding. “But it’s worth a try.”
As Dax gingerly maneuvered the Rio Grande a few meters over the heads of the crowd, she saw many of the people below look up, some pointing. She quickly entered several commands into the instrument panel, then swiped her hand over the phaser controls.
Moments later, the phasers had created a wide swath in the crowd as hundreds of people fell to the ground, unconscious.
Let’s hope that’s the worst violence we’re going to see here today, Dax thought as she sought out a safe landing space.
* * *
Brushing his long, dark hair back from his high, spotted forehead, Ranul Keru emerged from one of the heavily fortified cave entrances just in time to see a Danube-class Starfleet runabout turn its phasers on one of the mo
st unruly portions of the protesting crowd. He was momentarily appalled, until he observed that no one had been burned or vaporized; the vessel’s weapons had been fired at low power—just enough to stun.
Moments later, the runabout landed near the caves’ main entrance, as guards moved aside. Keru joined the captain of the guard as he waited for the runabout’s occupants to emerge. The craft’s hatch moved outward, and two figures stepped onto the rocky ground. One was a diminutive woman in her twenties; she was dressed in a Starfleet uniform, and her dark hair was cut short. The other was older, an iron-haired man wearing a Trill military uniform. Keru recognized him at once.
“General Cyl, I’m Captain Doyos,” the leader of the guard said. “We’ve been calling for backup for an hour now, since things began getting ugly. More protesters have arrived since then, and some of those brought vehicles and weapons.”
“Someone’s been jamming your communications. Probably neo-Purist agents who have even more dirty tricks up their sleeves,” Cyl said. “We didn’t know.” He turned to the woman. “Ezri, I will leave the historical research in your capable hands. I need to strategize with my people out here to keep the caves protected.”
“All right, General,” the woman said.
As the general and the captain began conversing, the woman turned to Keru and presented her hand. “I’m from Starfleet, and I’ve come to ask for the help of the Guardians.”
Keru smiled warmly and shook her much-smaller hand. A jolt of recognition struck him as their flesh came into contact, filling a portion of his mind with new awareness. A name.
“Dax. You’re hosting the Dax symbiont.”
Scowling slightly, Dax withdrew her hand. “You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to you Guardians doing that.”
Keru had to shake himself out of the euphoria of indirect symbiont telepathy. “Forgive me. I haven’t been doing this quite as long as some of the other Guardians here. It takes some getting used to.” Joining the Order had not only made permanent Keru’s desire not to enter a traditional symbiotic joining, it had also opened up within him a privileged channel of communication with the intelligent, sluglike creatures; he supposed it was probably as much a consequence of the Order’s assiduous training regime as it was of prolonged exposure to the unique environment of Mak’ala’s underground pools, which some said directly tapped the vital living heart of the planet itself. Though every fully initiated Guardian shared this rapport with the symbionts at least to some extent, no humanoid host seemed fully able to understand it. This wordless concord, evolved over the forgotten eons the unjoined Guardians had spent caring for the helpless symbionts, was arguably in some ways even more intimate than Trill symbiosis itself.