“Bring up all cameras on level three,” Cyl said to a nearby technician. “Focus the largest viewers on the speaker’s platform.” Dax could hear the urgency in his voice.
Multiple images came up on the screens, but none of them showed anyone at all. The speaker’s balcony was completely empty. “Where is Talris?” Gard asked. “What happened to the guards?”
“Talris might have decided to exercise the better part of valor,” said Julian.
“That doesn’t square with his reputation,” Dax said.
Cyl squinted at the viewers, studying them carefully. “Maybe they evacuated elsewhere because of the sniper activity.”
Gard shook his head. “This doesn’t add up. The balcony’s shields would have stopped a sniper. And the guards around Talris would have known that.”
Something about the images on the viewer was bothering Dax. Everything looked peaceful on and around the third-level balcony, as if nothing at all untoward were occurring a mere two floors below. It almost lookstoo peaceful.
A sudden realization struck her. “Magnify screen seven-Q, upper third quadrant,” Dax said to the technician who was beside Cyl. The screen image quickly changed, showing the profuse greenery that ringed the speaker’s platform. Above the dais was a red-plumed bird in flight.
Though its wings were fully extended, the bird was motionless, as though it had been flash-frozen an instant after takeoff
“Why is this image paused?” Cyl asked as he too noticed the discrepancy.
“It’s not,sir,” the technician said, his fingers sliding over a lit data panel. “This feed’s coming in live.”
Cyl pointed angrily toward the magnified and motionless bird on the viewscreen. “I see. So that fenzabird suddenly transformed itself into a fixed-wing aircraft. This feed is a still image!”
“Run the feed backward,” Rianu said, as several more of the technicians began working the panels in front of the anomalous image. Although index numbers scrolled backward rapidly, the images on the third floor and speaker’s platform viewscreens remained consistent—including the motionless bird. Finally, at minus nine minutes, the bird flew backward and returned to its perch. On another screen, a pair of guards pushing a tarp-covered hoverlift could be seen. One of them raised a hand from the hoverlift and aimed a small device directly at the cameras.
“Freeze it!” Cyl shouted. His eyebrows arched, and a look of anger flashed in his eyes. “These people are infiltrators. They sabotaged the feed before we even arrived.”
Gard was moving toward the turbolift before Cyl had even finished speaking. He pointed at a pair of armed guards as he sprinted. “You two are with us.”
Dax felt her adrenaline surge as she and Julian and Cyl moved toward the lift as well. Cyl tossed her a plisagraph, which she dutifully set for maximum scan before pulling the phaser from her hip to make sure it was fully charged.
“Set weapons to kill,” Cyl said as the lift enclosed them. “Whoever these people are, we can bet they won’t be very happy about being interrupted.”
Dax did as Cyl bid, though she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of killing. Then she turned toward Julian and saw that he had not switched his phaser past the “stun” setting.
Julian gave her a look that she wasn’t sure she was reading correctly. His eyes seemed argumentative and imploring at the same time. Because she was the one in charge of their mission, she knew she could order him to change the setting on his weapon. But she also knew that he had disregarded Cyl’s instruction because his primary loyalty was to Starfleet, not to Trill. That distinction set him apart not only from everyone else in the lift, but also from everyone else in the building.
Everyone on the planet, she realized.
He’s not one of us,Dax thought. Suddenly the current clash between joined and unjoined conspired with the sometimes conflicting feelings of Ezri Tigan and Ezri Dax. Starfleet training warred with Trill loyalty, threatening momentarily to overwhelm her.
And then the turbolift doors opened.
His heart in his throat, Bashir flattened himself against the wall as phaser fire rained in on them, burning a hole through the lift’s back wall. Cyl and Gard crouched near the floor, while Ezri and one of the security people Gard had brought along leaned forward to fire their weapons from the open, smoke-filled turbolift.
Another volley of shots passed back and forth before Bashir heard the sound of a pair of bodies crumpling to the floor in the corridor outside. One of the guards edged her way out the door, her weapon drawn and her stance defensive.
“Two down!” she said, her voice a low growl. Turning briskly with her weapon extended in a two-handed grip, the guard looked to either side, covering for the others. Suddenly, a phaser bolt shot her through the throat, half vaporizing her neck in a spray of wet matter. She immediately collapsed to the floor. Bashir instinctively started moving toward her, but restrained himself an instant later; the guard’s wound appeared mortal, and he knew there was no way to examine her without being killed himself.
Cyl and the remaining security guard fired in the direction from which the fatal shot had come, down a side corridor. Though the adversaries returned fire, Cyl and the guard continued shooting. Bashir heard a distant cry of pain, followed by the sound of another body hitting the tile floor.
Bashir crawled over to the fallen guard, even as Ezri moved with him, crouching with her phaser drawn and her scanning device raised. Bashir turned the stricken guard over to inspect her wound and saw immediately that she was beyond all help. Though the heat of the phaser beam had nearly cauterized her wound, it had also blown out her trachea as well as a great deal of her spine.
“I read three more humanoid life signs in that direction,” Ezri said, angling the small scanning device Cyl had given her toward the tower’s east corridors, then toward the building’s western side. Bashir recognized the palm-sized device as a powerful, Trill-specific bioscanner known as a plisagraph. “Three this way as well, including one that looks pretty weak.”
Gard tapped the remaining guard on the shoulder, then pointed down a side corridor. “We’ll take the east wing. Let’s hope one of those life signs belongs to Talris.”
Ezri shook her head. “I don’t think he’s here. I’m not reading any symbiont life signs on this floor. Other than our own, I mean.”
“That weak humanoid life sign you picked up might belong to the one we just hit,” Cyl said, frowning and nodding.
“He may not have taken a direct hit,” Bashir said. He still wasn’t happy about Cyl’s insistence that they shoot to kill. And despite the horrible death the infiltrators had just inflicted on the security guard, he still hoped their adversaries wouldn’t have to die unnecessarily.
Cyl gestured westward with his phaser. “Dax, Doctor, come with me. And stay sharp.”
The team split up. Cyl, Dax, and Bashir moved cautiously down the wide corridor, hugging the walls and pausing to take cover behind alternating rows of support columns and large potted plants. Eventually, they reached a three-way junction, where the body of one of the impostor guards lay.
Crouching beside him, Bashir noted that he was dead—and that the phaser clutched in his hand was still warm from recent use. “No life signs here, weak or otherwise.” He looked up at Ezri.
She consulted her scanner again. “My plisagraph is still picking up three Trill humanoid life signs, but that’s all. One of the others must be hurt. They’re down that way.”
Even as Ezri pointed toward a windowless, unlit segment of corridor, the plisagraph in her hand exploded in a shower of sparks as a phaser blast hit it. She let out a cry and spun into the wall, then crumpled to the tile floor.
Cyl hit the ground instantly, returning fire. Using the dead attacker as a shield, he sent a volley of blasts down the darkened corridor, briefly illuminating it as brightly as the noontime sky.