Keru saw that the general was sitting on the rocks at the side of the pool. Though he looked as pale as death, Cyl wore an expression of defiant determination.
“I haven’t been affected by the blast, General,” Keru said. “I ought to go with you.” Or instead of you,he thought.
“I’m perfectly capable of handling this on my own, Mister Keru.” Cyl took one of the suits from Keru’s big hands and started donning it.
Keru scowled, not fooled for a moment by the general’s brave show. He reached for the other suit and began putting it on. Cyl laid an unsteady hand on his shoulder, stopping him.
“No. Stay here, Mister Keru. You have injured friends who need first aid. More importantly, you have to tend to the symbionts. The few who’ve survived are going to need your help badly.”
“You’re…not well, General.”
“That’s not as important at the moment as making certain that Lieutenant Dax fulfills her mission.”
Finally accepting the inevitability of Cyl’s decision, Keru set his own suit down and began to help Cyl finish suiting up. As he worked, Keru heard volitional movement from at least one other symbiont in the pool, a sign that both buoyed his spirits and confirmed that the general was right. The symbionts are going to need my help more than they ever have before.
As he locked the helmet to the environmental suit’s neck ring, Keru noticed that Cyl now seemed calmer, more in command of himself. But intense pain remained evident in the general’s eyes, and was betrayed by the random, spasmodic twitches of his forehead and jawline.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done here today,” the general said, once again placing his gloved hand on Keru’s shoulder. “And neither Cyl nor I blame you for what has happened. Without your help, many more of us would be gone.”
It didn’t escape Keru that the general had referred to the symbiont within him as though it were a separate entity. He wondered if the words the general had spoken hadn’t come entirely from either Taulin or Cyl. His symbiosis is dissolving,he thought, and a profound sadness settled across his soul.
“If you’re not back in two hours, I’m coming after you,” Keru said.
Fully suited, Taulin Cyl stepped into the pool and slipped beneath the murky, corpse-strewn waters. Keru watched him vanish, leaving not even a stream of bubbles in his wake. He wished he’d asked the general if he had any messages he wanted relayed to his loved ones.
And hoped he wouldn’t have to fulfill that same promise for Ezri Dax.
Stardate 53777.6
Bashir rejoined the busy trauma teams mere minutes before a veritable flood of new injured patients entered the already bustling triage center. Except for a few dozen unjoined individuals who had suffered grievous injuries—apparently as a result of hovercar failures and the like caused by the bombs’ radiation pulses—virtually all of the first hundred or so patients to be carried, dragged, or gurneyed into Manev Central Hospital were joined Trills.
Though the sudden influx of ailing and dying joined had stretched the hospital’s already strained resources well past their limits, Bashir knew that he and his medical colleagues had no choice but to soldier on. He tried his best to attend to the unjoined who seemed a secondary priority to the staff. Over the course of the next hour or so, he came to understand clearly that the joined hadto be bumped to the head of the line. The sight of the lifeless body of Dr. Renhol—the woman from the Symbiosis Commission whose desire for Trill secrecy he had accommodated five years earlier—brought that realization home with brutal finality. Her symbiont had been removed and transported either to a symbiont-specific care facility, or back to Mak’ala or one of the other breeding pools. Nobody seemed to know whether or not it had survived.
It occurred to him that Renhol had been the prominent commissioner who’d been gurneyed into the trauma room while he was preoccupied with saving the life of a grievously injured small boy. Though he didn’t regret the choice he’d made, Renhol’s passing pained him nonetheless.
Another thing that bothered him was that nearly all the medical personnel here—joined and unjoined alike, from Dr. Vadel Torvin on down—seemed far too quick to sacrifice the hosts of those injured symbionts. The hosts whom Dr. Torvin had declared beyond saving—despite the fact that most of them had sustained no life-threatening injuries—received about as much regard as had the hospital’s backlog of unjoined casualties.
Which was to say they were being ignored completely.
Now bereft of their symbionts, fourteen former hosts were currently being left untended even as the medics carefully transferred their symbionts into nutrient-rich, hyronalin-saturated mobile symbiont pools in preparation for their transportation to Mak’ala or one of Trill’s other natural symbiont habitats. In this way, the Trill doctors hoped to save the symbionts’ accumulated memories and experiences, though the hosts that had carried the creatures were to be sacrificed to accomplish this.
But Bashir knew that there was no guarantee that the symbiont pools would be of any help to the creatures. Many of them seemed simply too far gone from the radiation their delicate and extraordinarily complex neural tissues had absorbed. And he wasn’t even sure that the very same terrorist weapons that had detonated in central Leran Manev hadn’t also been placed elsewhere. Who was to say that other such devices hadn’t also irradiated the Mak’ala pools?
Still, he had to concede that he could suggest no workable alternative to the removal of the symbionts—at least not yet, though he hadn’t stopped querying the hospital computers about alternative methodologies. And despite the megadoses of isoboramine and other symbiogenic neurotransmitters he had injected into scores of other dying joined people, they were growing progressively weaker, expiring right before his eyes. Their symbioses inevitably grew tenuous, rapidly dissolving as each of the symbionts went into convulsive neuroleptic shock. The joined who had taken the brunt of the neurogenic pulses were experiencing extreme autoimmune reactions, rejecting their symbionts as though the creatures were foreign, invading bodies.
It struck Bashir as ironic that this was precisely how the symbionts were regarded by the neo-Purist radicals, who were the only really likely culprits behind the radiation attacks.
One of the hardest things for a doctor to do was to watch a patient die. But Bashir seemed to have little choice in the matter. He knew all too well that a joining between a compatible host and a symbiont would become permanent after the first several days, after which time the host would be incapable of surviving without the symbiont. After crossing this physiological threshold, the two effectively merged into a single, indissoluble being. To separate symbiont from host past that point was to kill the host, just as surely as a terrestrial human would die following the removal of his or her liver, even though the organ might live on via transplantation to another person’s body.
From the severity of their autoimmune reactions, Bashir expected most of these hosts to take an hour or less to die once their symbionts were extracted. A few expired almost instantly after the removal of their symbionts, despite his best efforts to save them.
Such is the Trill reverence for the preservation of memories,he told himself as yet another host, a middle-aged woman, slipped away from him. He hoped that her radiation-plagued symbiont would somehow find a means of regenerating itself in the network of aqueous subterranean caverns where the unjoined symbionts spawned and recuperated between joinings. At least the dead woman’s experiences would live on in the symbiont, assuming it survived.