Above them, the hot gray water was clotted with symbionts, some moving of their own accord as they fled to the lower depths, others barely fluttering as they were carried by the currents generated by the swimmers. But she could see that many of them were not moving at all, their bodies lifeless, contracted into curls and spirals as though they had died convulsing in agony. Some of the plunging bodies emitted weak bioelectric flashes, a few of which came into direct contact with Ezri’s abdomen, and the Dax symbiont that dwelled there.
Now Dax wasn’t at all certain that she shouldreturn to the surface, though she knew her survival depended on it. The snippets of information she gleaned from the passing symbionts were scattered and garbled; even so, it was clear to her that something located near or on the surface had just brutally struck these creatures down en masse.
<<The Walker needs help.>>She “heard” the voice but wasn’t sure whether it had come from the caretaker or one of the countless injured and dying symbionts that tumbled past her into the stygian depths.
Dax felt lightheaded. She tried to speak, but found her throat so parched that she couldn’t. Then words no longer mattered, and her numb fingers released the caretaker’s cilia.
She drifted downward into the rain of small corpses, enfolded by heat and sweat and stifling darkness.
“Ezri?”The voice was familiar, but sounded as if it were coming from behind the thick duranium hatch of an airlock.
So far away. Let me sleep.
“Ezri Dax?”The voice was back. Insistent. Closer.
Ignore it. Go away.
“Para!”
Dax felt an electrical jolt course through her body, and she thrashed to the side. Her movements were slowed as if she were adrift in deep water. Then, as her senses returned, she realized that she wasin water. She was still deep in the pools below Mak’ala, where an outsize, millennia-old symbiont had been ferrying her back to the surface.
But someone else was here with her now.
“You’re awake,”that someone said, and she finally recognized the voice.
Taulin.She could make out his form in the darkness as her eyesight returned, and she saw that he, too, was clad in an EV suit. He floated about a meter away from her. But something was wrong with him. His face, clearly visible through his bubble helmet thanks to the glare of her own suit lights, was etched deeply with lines of pain.
“What’s wrong?” Dax asked, her tongue thick, her words coming with frustrating slowness.
A small, ordinary-looking symbiont swam near Cyl, It orbited him almost protectively, although it, too, seemed to be in pain. Cyl reached out his gauntleted hand, touching the side of the faceplate on Dax’s helmet. “They set off some kind of radiation-dispersal device on the surface. It irradiated all the joined Trill there, as well as the symbionts in the upper pools. Must have killed hundreds of symbionts.”He gestured toward the small symbiont that swam beside him. “Fal here was one of the lucky ones.”
Dax felt another electric jolt, this one composed entirely of her own fear for the vulnerable symbionts. Her senses all seemed to become crystalline, hyperacute. “How widespread was this thing?”
“It seemed to affect those nearest the surface the most,”the general said, his voice sounding tinny over the helmet speaker.
<<Neurogenic radiation,>>the caretaker said, speaking inside Dax’s mind. She was momentarily startled, not having seen the elder symbiont since just before passing out. The creature floated above her now, its rust-hued body buoyant and weightless. <<The Kurlans of old died in the same manner.That secret apparently did not remain concealed with all the others.>>
“Is it safe to go back to the surface?” Dax asked no one in particular. Her personal fear was escalating alongside the terrible sickness she was beginning to feel because of Cyl’s revelations. The fact that she was still alive at all struck her as nearly miraculous. “My suit’s environmental module was damaged. I can’t stay down here any longer.”
“I know. I replaced your module with mine,”the general said. “You have as long as you need to get back to the surface.”
“But how will you—”
“We are becoming unjoined,”the Cyl symbiont said, an arc of electricity traveling from the general’s abdomen to hers. “Our travels will take us where you have just been. To the Annuated.”
Dax realized that Cyl must already have conversed for some time with the caretaker symbiont. The general must indeed be near death for the ancient creature to tell him of the final mortal destination of all symbionts, and the accumulated memories carried within them.
She tried to blink away sudden tears. “No! There’s got to be some other way. Some way to heal you.” She thought of Julian. Surely he could find a way to prevent both Cyl and Taulin from expiring, if only she could get everyone out of this place quickly.
Taulin, the humanoid half of the general’s failing symbiosis, spoke again. Being joined herself, she found it easy to distinguish Taulin from Cyl, especially since the melding of the two minds had so obviously come undone. “There isn’t, Ezri. What was done to me on the surface cannot be undone. I have lived a long life, and my symbiont has lived far longer. I think we have served our people well.”
“You’re bothgoing to die?’ Dax asked, her voice choked.
“We do not know,”the Cyl symbiont said. “Taulin Kengro will no longer live in this body. The future is unknowable for me. But we must go now. To preserve the past, both Taulin’s and Cyl’s.”
“I hope you found something that can save our people,”Taulin said, wincing against a new spasm of pain. “It has been an honor to know you, Ezri Dax.”
“I hope…I hope we’ll know one another again someday.”
“But not soon,”Cyl answered. “Dax has much living yet to do.”
Tears rolled down Ezri’s cheek. For the first time, she noticed how cool the air inside her suit had become, thanks to Cyl’s and Taulin’s act of sacrifice.
Cyl slipped away from Dax and began to descend, in a slow, lazy free fall. The small symbiont that had accompanied him followed him down.
Dax aimed her wrist light down and watched him sinking away from her.
And then a whisker-thin arc of blue-white energy sparked toward her from out of the depths, connecting briefly to the symbiont in her abdomen.
“Good-bye, Para,”Neema said to Audrid, using the childhood nickname. “I always wanted to seeMak’relle Dur.”
The water below her erupted in a burst of oxygen bubbles. Dax knew that Taulin Kengro had opened his environmental suit to allow the Cyl symbiont egress.
The bubbles floated silently past Dax, and all she saw below her was darkness, utter and complete.
A moment later, she felt a presence behind her. Dax turned, and her wrist lights illuminated the large symbiont who had accompanied her up from the depths.
<<I regret your loss, youngling,>>the caretaker said, gently wrapping a pair of its cilia-like tentacles around one of Dax’s arms. <<Shall we continue to the surface now?>>
Stardate 53778.8
After concluding the final surgical procedure he was to perform on this very long night, Bashir carefully made his way across the four wide city blocks that separated Manev Central Hospital from the Senate Tower. Although a few passes of a dermal regenerator had removed the visual evidence of the mugging he had suffered the previous evening, the memory of the assault remained vivid in Bashir’s mind. His body, too, reminded him of the incident frequently as he walked; his ribs remained sore because he hadn’t yet found the time to treat his minor but annoying deep-tissue injuries.