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.

<<You have found what you sought,>>the caretaker said amid small crackles of energy. It was not asking a question.

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.”

<<Your needs and desires are not nearly so difficult to parse as you might think.>>

“Thanks. I think.” Dax felt too fatigued to react to the caretaker’s barb, if that’s what it was.

<<Your ancestors did what they thought they had to do, Ezri Dax,>>said the caretaker, prompting Dax to wonder if the creature had eavesdropped on the memories the Annuated had shared with her. <<You must try not to judge them too harshly. They discovered that our kind can be tampered with, and perverted into a thing of horror. They sought to keep others from discovering this.>>

“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.”

<<Yes,>>the caretaker said. <<They covered up their embarrassments. Just as Audrid Dax did. And so many others before and after, both Swimmers and Walkers.>>

Before Dax could compose a rejoinder, the caretaker made an impatient noise and added, <<The Annuated are not accustomed to thinking at speeds compatible with extreme youth. You must leave now, Ezri Dax, and allow them their rest.>>

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.