“You won’t need it if what we have planned works. If it doesn’t work, I won’t give the signal. Just tell the troops.”

With a worried glance, the lieutenant began relaying the order down the line.

Cyl kept his eye on the runabout, trying to clear his mind of the shouts and shots that rang through the air. The seconds ticked by. One minute.

He realized that he was holding his breath, and exhaled. Two minutes.Another thirty seconds passed.

A beam of pale, bluish light suddenly flashed out of the forward viewport of the spacecraft. “Now, Lieutenant!” Cyl barked.

“Retreat!” the lieutenant yelled, and the embattled soldiers stepped backward.

For a moment, the crowd was unsure what was happening, and then they surged forward en masse—and were just as quickly stopped, their bodies bouncing off an immovable object. Their phaser blasts ricocheted in midair, as did several rocks and other projectiles the protesters threw.

The lieutenant and several of his men looked over at Cyl, puzzled expressions on their faces. Cyl grinned and pointed to the runabout. “Our Guardian friend modified the ship’s force fields to enclose everything from the skirmish line to the cave’s entrance. Nobody is going to get into the caves now.”

The soldiers cheered, some of them pounding each other on the back. Almost all of them, Cyl was pleased to note, remained vigilant.

Then one of the nearby troopers pointed into the crowd, calling to the lieutenant. “Sir! The hostiles are driving a vehicle toward us!”

Cyl turned to see that someone had indeed driven a cargo skimmer into the crowd, which was now stirred well toward panic. The general hoped that common sense would entice the gathering to disperse before anyone was seriously hurt.

“Don’t worry,” Cyl told the lieutenant as he watched the skimmer make its herky-jerky approach through the crowd. “They can’t get that thing through the force field.” He felt reasonably certain that the Starfleet shields would hold easily against such a relatively unsophisticated attack.

But the driver didn’t seem intent on continuing his approach to the shield boundary. Instead, he stopped, exited the skimmer, and scrambled onto the vehicle’s roof.

Cyl couldn’t hear what the driver was shouting, but in a blink, the skimmer exploded with light, forcing him to avert his eyes. Cyl’s dazzled eyes could barely make out the multicolored disturbances in the runabout’s force fields, punctuated by tiny, short-lived conflagrations that resembled thousands of glowing, flame-loving mun’ikabugs stupidly immolating themselves in a fire.

Then his vision went white. Inside his abdomen, the Cyl symbiont spasmed in agony, sending waves of pain through every system in his body.

What have they done?Cyl thought just before a blanket of darkness mercifully replaced the excruciating white light.

His vision still slowly clearing perhaps a minute after the dazzling light-pulse had come and gone, Keru found he had to open the runabout’s hatch manually, since some of the ship’s electrical systems seemed to have failed. Luckily, a backup console confirmed that his improvised force field was continuing to hold. Not that it mattered much at the moment, since everyone outside was either writhing on the ground or not moving at all.

The runabout’s sensors could tell him precious little about the detonation. Though the blast wave had consisted primarily of a fairly standard electromagnetic pulse, it also had apparently carried some unknown type of fast-dissipating radiation. The radiation evidently hadn’t penetrated the runabout’s hull, where its shields were strongest, but might well have pierced the force fields nearest the cave entrance, where the fields would have been at their most attenuated. Fortunately, the readings confirmed that there was little if any danger now of his being exposed to lingering radiation. Hoping no other bombs were present, he opened the force field where it surrounded the hatch and clambered outside.

As he approached the soldiers, Keru was grateful to see that most of them appeared to be either temporarily stunned or dazzled by the flash. None of them seemed to have been hurt nearly as badly as had those on the other side of the force field.

Except for one. Taulin Cyl.

The general lay on his back, and Keru could see that his abdomen was roiling beneath his uniform jacket. His symbiont is going into shock.Keru had only seen this happen twice before during his brief tenure as a Guardian. On both occasions, they had tried to save the symbiont by returning it to the pools; only once had their efforts succeeded.

Keru yelled over to two of the soldiers who seemed the least affected by the blast. “Come help me with General Cyl! We’ve got to get him into the caves!”

Minutes later, they had managed to carry him down from the rocky outcropping that overlooked the plain and up into the cavern’s mountainside entrance, where it seemed that the majority of the Guardians were also mostly unaffected by the blast; only those who had been nearest the entrance during the detonation were partially blinded, and none showed any other ill effects. But as they brought Cyl nearer to the pools, Keru heard a mournful keening issuing from deeper in the caves.

Keru saw several of the Guardians standing near the closest of the pools, watched them screaming and thrusting their hands into the murky water, witnessed the shock and despair etched into their faces as they turned and regarded their equally horrified brethren. And then he saw why they were wailing.

The surfaces of the pools were clotted with floating symbionts, but the only movements they made were either the result of the Guardians trying vainly to assist them, or were caused by other symbionts floating up from below, jostling the small lumpen bodies that bobbed on the surface like so many rotting bogblossoms.

Keru and the others fell to their knees as the enormity of the situation became apparent. They’ve killed the symbionts.The thought came as a scream in Keru’s mind, and he couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t shouted it aloud.

Cyl groaned and reached up to clutch his arm. “Something’s…wrong with…” He seemed too fatigued and distressed to finish his warning.

Knowing that the time to grieve would have to wait until later, Keru stood and dragged Cyl toward the largest of the pools, the one that Dax had dived into just an hour or so earlier. Many of the floating symbionts had already begun to sink again, like balloons that were losing their air.

“We need to extract his symbiont,” Keru shouted to a pair of Guardians who stood nearby, looking stunned. “It’s still alive.” He removed Cyl’s jacket and pushed him into the water, entering the pool with the general. He held Cyl’s arms to keep him from flopping face-first into the water.

And then, miraculously, a silver discharge arced across the water toward Cyl. Moments later, a weaker discharge came from the general’s bloated abdominal pouch, and Keru saw dark, indistinct movement underneath the pool’s gray surface.

“They’re communicating!” one of the Guardians shouted. “They’re not dead, at least not all of them.”

Cyl rolled in the water and looked toward Keru, his eyes ablaze with a light that resembled insanity. “I need to go down there. Dax is in trouble.”

“What?” Keru was unsure he had heard the general correctly.

“Dax is still down in the deep pools. She needs my help. Fal told me. Get me an environmental suit.”

“Sir…”

Cyl’s eyes met his with an imploring look. “Get it now, Mister Keru. Please. We haven’t much time.”

Two Guardians held Cyl in place as Keru climbed from the pool and ran out of the caves into the gathering night. He was out of breath and shivering by the time he reached the runabout to fetch the remaining two environmental suits, but he didn’t allow himself to pause for breath. By the time he got back to the pools, he felt as if his lungs were on fire.