“If there areother bombs planted elsewhere on Trill,” Bashir said, “they could detonate at any time.”
Ezri nodded, looking glum. “And there’s no way to be sure of finding them all.”
The general clicked off the comm unit, then faced Bashir, Ezri, and Gard. Without commenting on Bashir’s and Ezri’s words, Cyl moved briskly toward the door and gestured for them to follow him.
Ezri and Gard followed the general out of the chamber and back into the hallway. Before following, Bashir took a moment to cover the slain senator’s body—as well as the corpse of his killer—with the tarp that had formerly shrouded the bomb.
After walking into the corridor, he stepped over the rubble and the dead revolutionary trapped beneath it. He caught a glimpse of the man’s face.
Bashir wondered what kind of person this man had been before the current unrest had engulfed his planet. Is your cause worth dying for? Is it worth killing for?
But the Trill man was dead and gone. He would never answer those questions. And Bashir had the horrible feeling that he would have to ask them many more times before he got a satisfactory answer.
7
President Maz was still unreachable via comlink, which wasn’t surprising given the tremendous degree of disorder that had suddenly engulfed the city center. Many of the comm frequencies were jammed, though the emergency channels remained open.
Dax agreed with Cyl’s assessment that there was little the four of them could do to alter the course of the riot, especially now that Senator Talris—who’d represented the best hope for a peaceful resolution to the crisis—was dead. Dax and Cyl entered the late legislator’s sparsely furnished office, where Julian and Gard had already activated the desk computer.
“Let’s see exactly what the neo-Purists have to say,” Gard said as he patched Talris’s computer into the newsnet, where it grabbed the broadcast that had been recorded moments earlier.
“Which one of the neo-Purist leaders issued this latest statement?” Julian asked Cyl.
“Does it matter?” Gard asked as he finished tapping the interface console. Clearly his sympathies toward the unjoined protesters who sought openness from their government did not extend to terrorists.
“My people inform me it was Nas Ditrel,” said Cyl, his jaw set in a hard line. “She’s one of the group’s most prominent spokespeople.”
A moment later a middle-aged woman appeared on the screen, her hard, angular face framed by a thick ring of dark brown spots. A simple blue drapery was all that was visible of the background behind her, making an assessment of her physical location essentially impossible. Though she appeared gaunt and haggard, her voice rang with strength and determination. Still, Dax thought she looked stressed almost to the point of physical and emotional collapse.
Ditrel began without preamble, speaking rapidly but precisely. “Thanks to today’s Starfleet testimony before the Senate—as well as long-classified government archaeological records that have recently come into our possession—we have verified that there is indeed a link not only between the symbionts and the parasitic creatures who recently attacked Bajor and attempted to attack our world, but also a close relationship between the parasites and the extinct civilization on the distant planet Kurl.”
Dax felt as though a great chasm had suddenly opened beneath her feet. She suddenly understood Cyl’s impulse toward secrecy. These people are acting on informationI supplied to the Senate in a public forum.
She realized suddenly that Julian was beside her, and had taken her hand. His brown eyes were brimming with compassion, as though he had read her thoughts. “It isn’t your fault, Ezri. You were obliged to answer the Senate’s questions.”
She glanced at Gard and Cyl; their hard expressions made her wonder if they might not be quite so forgiving.
“President Maz’s government has been concealing this from you,”Ditrel continued, interrupting Dax’s reverie. “As has the Senate and centuries of their predecessors. The same power structure that uses symbiosis to keep the vast majority of us ‘in our places’ apparently doesn’t want you to know that the Kurlans were in fact ancient Trill colonists.”The woman paused, as though allowing her listeners time to digest her last statement.
Dax found that statement patently absurd; from Julian’s bewildered scowl, she gathered that he did as well. Gard and Cyl were stone-faced, essentially unreadable.
Have they heardthis before, too?
“Can you pause the playback?” Dax asked Gard, who immediately entered a command into the terminal, freezing Nas’s image and muting her voice.
“This proves that neo-Purists or other unjoined radicals have infiltrated the government pretty thoroughly,” Cyl said, shaking his head. His stoic demeanor had begun to give way to a deeply troubled expression. “Somehow, they found out about the parasites’ affinity for Kurlan artifacts.”
“But the rest of it sounds like pure conspiracy-theory fiction,” Gard said to Cyl. “Most people will find stories about ancient, forgotten Trill colonies pretty farfetched.”
Dax nodded. “That’s just what I was thinking.”
“I’m glad to see I’m not the odd man out here,” said Julian, releasing Dax’s hand. “From my reading of Trill history, your people didn’t make much use of warp technology until about three centuries ago.”
“It was actually a little longer ago than that,” Dax said. “Trill had already developed warp drive by the time Vulcans made first contact with us.” She recalled that Lela, the Dax symbiont’s first host, had been a little girl at the time of first contact. That initial visit by the Vulcans had generated a great deal of fear among the Trill populace, which had found itself divided on the issue of whether or not to accept alien interaction.
“But the Kurlans were already extinct millennia before that,” Julian said. “Most exoarchaeologists believe they succumbed either to a plague or to biowarfare many centuries before the Trill became capable of interstellar travel. How could anyone believe the Kurlans are an offshoot of the Trill?”
“Let’s find out,” Gard said, then restarted the playback.
Ditrel resumed speaking, her gaze intense and locked directly on the visual pickup in front of her. “For millennia, the joined ruling class has covered up the fact that the parasites originated on ancient Kurl, during a long-suppressed prehistoric era of early Trill interstellar expansion.”
“ ‘Prehistoric,’ ” Dax repeated.
Julian shrugged and spoke in a stage whisper. “I suppose any previously unrevealed era of ancient Trill space colonization would have to be prehistoric, by definition. Of course, that begs the question of how anyone could possibly know about it today.”
“She mentioned old records of archaeological digs,” Dax said. “Maybe someone discovered—”
Cyl made a shushing noise as the woman on the screen continued. Dax immediately stopped speaking, and Julian looked as though he wanted to bite off a sharp reply to the general before subsiding into silence.
“…cording to the documents now in our possession, five thousand years ago, Trill colonists formed an exclusive society on Kurl in whicheveryone was joined to a symbiont. There was no ‘Great Unjoined’ underclass among these people. The Kurlans therefore fancied that their ‘joined-only’ civilization would be better than that of the homeworld, where the unjoined have always been in the majority.