The woman I love is going to die.
In preparation for the procedure, Ezri was moved back into the small surgical bay, where she slowly drifted back to consciousness. Her eyes opened and she smiled. Despite her pallor and fever, the smile made her as radiant as Bashir had ever seen her.
And it’s the last time. The last time I will ever see that smile.
His heart pounded, auricles and ventricles transformed to hammers and anvils. Doing his best to manage his roiling emotions, Bashir explained to her what was about to happen. She listened attentively and took the news with considerably more grace than Nog had. Or Merimark. Or even Krissten, for that matter.
But Ezri’s equanimity rattled him at first. He had to remind himself that Dax had already experienced host death eight times before.
“I understand, Julian. I love you. And I trust you to do whatever you have to do…to save Dax.”
Once again, he heard Jadzia’s voice, echoing up from a well six years deep: Don’t blame yourself, Julian. You did all you could.
He desperately wished he could believe those words.
“Julian.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to be conscious when you…cut the cord. Not like Curzon. That was different.”
Bashir knew that Curzon’s symbiont had been surgically removed as well. But that had been done at the end of a very long, very satisfying life.
“I understand,” Bashir whispered, his words catching in his throat.
“I don’t want to be… emptied,like the time Verad took the symbiont…” She trailed off. Bashir noticed for the first time that her face was wet.
Julian,Jadzia confessed in the back corridors of his mind. I’m scared.
“I understand,” he repeated. He felt a single fat tear roll down his cheek. Another one jostled for position behind it. He squeezed her hand gently. She squeezed back, hard. He bent down and brushed his lips against hers, then straightened and released her hand.
“I’m ready, Julian,” she said at length.
Blinking away his tears, he donned his surgical mask and lifted an exoscalpel from the tray beside the operating table. At his nod, Krissten carefully attached the delta wave inducer to Ezri’s temple.
“Ensign Juarez is standing by to activate the artificial environment container,” Krissten said in a subdued voice. After learning about Ezri’s condition, Edgardo demanded to be allowed back on duty, insisting his leg had healed sufficiently.
Ezri mouthed a silent I love youto Bashir, then smiled.
“Good-bye, Ezri,” he said.
Her lips curled into a faint smile. Then oblivion took her.
Responding to Bashir’s nod, Krissten activated the sterile field. He gripped the exoscalpel tightly in his gloved hand, grateful that the instrument showed no signs of slipping this time. Krissten silently opened the front of Ezri’s surgical gown, exposing Ezri’s abdominal pouch. Very gently, he moved the exoscalpel’s tip across her abdomen, leaving a slender crimson line in the instrument’s wake. A moment later, the body of the symbiont began to emerge, its brown, lumpy skin glistening under the room’s bright lights.
The symbiont inched forward, fairly oozing into his hand. After it had emerged entirely from Ezri’s body, Bashir cradled it gingerly. The eyeless, limbless creature’s helpless emergence reminded him of a cesarean section he had once performed; he had to remind himself this “baby” carried within it a store of experience and knowledge at least an order of magnitude greater than his own.
“This is going to be a somewhat unusual procedure,” Bashir told Krissten as he raised the symbiont slightly higher, studying the superficial patches of necrotic tissue that had already begun to appear along the moist, amber-colored umbilicus still connected to Ezri’s abdominal pouch. “There’s already been so much neural depolarization along the entire neuro-umbilical trunk that the nerve bundles will have to be cut in a specific order to minimize the risk of neuroleptic shock for the symbiont.”
“Understood,” Krissten said, her voice muffled slightly by her surgical mask.
“Neurocortical separator, please.”
She took his exoscalpel and replaced it with the requested implement. Gently hefting the symbiont in his left hand, he touched the tip of the compact, gleaming cylinder to a point about six centimeters down the length of the umbilical cord.
Ezri’s body jerked reflexively as the separator sank its tiny polyduranium probe into the cord. “Note that I have just severed the gross motor pathway nerve bundle,” Bashir said, his voice sounding flat and tinny in his own ears. He felt detached from his actions, as though he were a first-year med student watching with his classmates while a faculty member performed surgery in a Starfleet Medical operating theater.
He knew that he couldn’t proceed without that kind of detachment.
“The separator is now locking onto the fine motor bundles,” Bashir said, pressing on. Ezri’s fingers spasmed as the second nerve-fiber bundle separated. He withdrew the separator and closed his eyes for a moment.
I’m killing her. Just as surely as if I’d tossed her out an airlock.
“Symbiont vital signs are weak but holding steady,” said Krissten. “No sign of neuroleptic shock.”
Forcing his self-recriminations aside, Bashir opened his eyes and focused on the umbilicus with renewed concentration. Next, he severed the monopolar neurons that coordinated autonomic neurophysiological exchanges between Ezri’s and Dax’s nervous systems. Then he cut the redundant autonomic glial-cell pathways. He paused for a moment to recall the correct order: major, minor, and ancillary nodes. Yes, that was right.
Nearly done. God, let this be finished before I turn this thing on myself.
Next, the separator’s laser bit into the RDNAL organelle, a construct that consisted of a long tube buried in the very core of the umbilical’s complex bundles of nerve fibers. Moving nimbly, Bashir sealed the organelle on Ezri’s end of the umbilicus, which fell onto her abdomen like so much discarded ODN cable.
Jadzia’s voice haunted him once again. I’ve never felt so empty.He forced himself to ignore the memories—to ignore Ezri, who lay before him not quite dead, not quite alive, yet still gone forever.
“Note,” he said, “that the symbiont is now completely free of the host’s body. There’s been no change in the symbiont’s vitals.”
Krissten turned toward Nurse Juarez standing quietly by the door. “Edgardo, please ready the container.” Juarez approached the table, prepared to take the symbiont to the oblong receptacle which lay in the far corner of the room.
“Krissten, please prepare a hypo with twenty cc’s of isoboramine. I’m going to inject it directly into the symbiont’s end of the umbilicus.”
Krissten hesitated for a moment, then fetched the hypo and placed it in Bashir’s hand. She held the symbiont for him while he gently applied it to the tip of the umbilicus and pressed the plunger home. Bashir felt a wave of relief sweep over him as Krissten carefully handed the symbiont to Juarez, who in turn carried it toward the open, liquid-filled container in the corner.
Krissten turned back to Bashir, a question in her eyes.
“Yes?” Bashir said as he allowed his gaze to wander back to Ezri. He watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest, listened to the gentle sussuration of her breathing.
“We tried this drug before,” Krissten said. “But it had no effect. Why the second injection?”
Bashir gave his head a weary shake. “That was isoboramine, Krissten. This time I used boramine, which should stave off the symbiont’s growing necrosis and prevent delayed neuroleptic shock while it’s confined to the artificial environment.”
“No,Doctor.”
Bashir had never heard Krissten flatly contradict him before. He looked toward her and saw that her eyes had become immense. She appeared near panic.