Outside the Senate Tower, however, the situation was much worse. Protesters were throwing whatever was handy, and the guards were responding with force. Batons rose and fell, and the actinic flash of phaser fire split the air, some directed at the protesters, some aimed at the police. In the bunker, Dax noticed several people gathered near one monitor, each speaking into separate comm devices. On their viewscreen, she saw a flash of light as a soldier targeted a civilian sniper; the monitoring officers cheered momentarily, congratulating the soldier over one of the comm units. Dax assumed they had helped the shooter pinpoint his target. Though she was no stranger to combat, the sight of it occurring in the once tranquil Trill capital made her feel almost physically ill. After all, it was the living legacy of Verad, whose poisonous, invidious memories still lingered within her because of her symbiont’s brief joining with him.
“There’s got to be a way to resolve this without so much violence,” she said. “Can’t we release some neural gas in the plaza, or set up a phaser cannon for a wide-dispersal stun blast?”
“Either of those options could cause some deaths as well,” said Cyl, shaking his head.
“I thought Talris was supposed to speak to the crowd,” Julian said. “Shouldn’t he have started by now?”
Dax saw a look of surprise flicker across the faces of both Cyl and Gard as each of them realized that several minutes had passed since they had left the senator on the tower’s third floor. She knew they were thinking the same thing she was: What is taking Talris so long?
“Bring up all cameras on level three,” Cyl said to a nearby technician. “Focus the largest viewers on the speaker’s platform.” Dax could hear the urgency in his voice.
Multiple images came up on the screens, but none of them showed anyone at all. The speaker’s balcony was completely empty. “Where is Talris?” Gard asked. “What happened to the guards?”
“Talris might have decided to exercise the better part of valor,” said Julian.
“That doesn’t square with his reputation,” Dax said.
Cyl squinted at the viewers, studying them carefully. “Maybe they evacuated elsewhere because of the sniper activity.”
Gard shook his head. “This doesn’t add up. The balcony’s shields would have stopped a sniper. And the guards around Talris would have known that.”
Something about the images on the viewer was bothering Dax. Everything looked peaceful on and around the third-level balcony, as if nothing at all untoward were occurring a mere two floors below. It almost lookstoo peaceful.
A sudden realization struck her. “Magnify screen seven-Q, upper third quadrant,” Dax said to the technician who was beside Cyl. The screen image quickly changed, showing the profuse greenery that ringed the speaker’s platform. Above the dais was a red-plumed bird in flight.
Though its wings were fully extended, the bird was motionless, as though it had been flash-frozen an instant after takeoff
“Why is this image paused?” Cyl asked as he too noticed the discrepancy.
“It’s not,sir,” the technician said, his fingers sliding over a lit data panel. “This feed’s coming in live.”
Cyl pointed angrily toward the magnified and motionless bird on the viewscreen. “I see. So that fenzabird suddenly transformed itself into a fixed-wing aircraft. This feed is a still image!”
“Run the feed backward,” Rianu said, as several more of the technicians began working the panels in front of the anomalous image. Although index numbers scrolled backward rapidly, the images on the third floor and speaker’s platform viewscreens remained consistent—including the motionless bird. Finally, at minus nine minutes, the bird flew backward and returned to its perch. On another screen, a pair of guards pushing a tarp-covered hoverlift could be seen. One of them raised a hand from the hoverlift and aimed a small device directly at the cameras.
“Freeze it!” Cyl shouted. His eyebrows arched, and a look of anger flashed in his eyes. “These people are infiltrators. They sabotaged the feed before we even arrived.”
Gard was moving toward the turbolift before Cyl had even finished speaking. He pointed at a pair of armed guards as he sprinted. “You two are with us.”
Dax felt her adrenaline surge as she and Julian and Cyl moved toward the lift as well. Cyl tossed her a plisagraph, which she dutifully set for maximum scan before pulling the phaser from her hip to make sure it was fully charged.
“Set weapons to kill,” Cyl said as the lift enclosed them. “Whoever these people are, we can bet they won’t be very happy about being interrupted.”
Dax did as Cyl bid, though she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of killing. Then she turned toward Julian and saw that he had not switched his phaser past the “stun” setting.
Julian gave her a look that she wasn’t sure she was reading correctly. His eyes seemed argumentative and imploring at the same time. Because she was the one in charge of their mission, she knew she could order him to change the setting on his weapon. But she also knew that he had disregarded Cyl’s instruction because his primary loyalty was to Starfleet, not to Trill. That distinction set him apart not only from everyone else in the lift, but also from everyone else in the building.
Everyone on the planet, she realized.
He’s not one of us,Dax thought. Suddenly the current clash between joined and unjoined conspired with the sometimes conflicting feelings of Ezri Tigan and Ezri Dax. Starfleet training warred with Trill loyalty, threatening momentarily to overwhelm her.
And then the turbolift doors opened.
His heart in his throat, Bashir flattened himself against the wall as phaser fire rained in on them, burning a hole through the lift’s back wall. Cyl and Gard crouched near the floor, while Ezri and one of the security people Gard had brought along leaned forward to fire their weapons from the open, smoke-filled turbolift.
Another volley of shots passed back and forth before Bashir heard the sound of a pair of bodies crumpling to the floor in the corridor outside. One of the guards edged her way out the door, her weapon drawn and her stance defensive.
“Two down!” she said, her voice a low growl. Turning briskly with her weapon extended in a two-handed grip, the guard looked to either side, covering for the others. Suddenly, a phaser bolt shot her through the throat, half vaporizing her neck in a spray of wet matter. She immediately collapsed to the floor. Bashir instinctively started moving toward her, but restrained himself an instant later; the guard’s wound appeared mortal, and he knew there was no way to examine her without being killed himself.
Cyl and the remaining security guard fired in the direction from which the fatal shot had come, down a side corridor. Though the adversaries returned fire, Cyl and the guard continued shooting. Bashir heard a distant cry of pain, followed by the sound of another body hitting the tile floor.
Bashir crawled over to the fallen guard, even as Ezri moved with him, crouching with her phaser drawn and her scanning device raised. Bashir turned the stricken guard over to inspect her wound and saw immediately that she was beyond all help. Though the heat of the phaser beam had nearly cauterized her wound, it had also blown out her trachea as well as a great deal of her spine.
“I read three more humanoid life signs in that direction,” Ezri said, angling the small scanning device Cyl had given her toward the tower’s east corridors, then toward the building’s western side. Bashir recognized the palm-sized device as a powerful, Trill-specific bioscanner known as a plisagraph. “Three this way as well, including one that looks pretty weak.”
Gard tapped the remaining guard on the shoulder, then pointed down a side corridor. “We’ll take the east wing. Let’s hope one of those life signs belongs to Talris.”