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  “You’ve got me at a disadvantage, Mister . . .” Dax said, trailing off as she eyed him with apparent suspicion.

  For a moment, he stroked his capacious mustache, a nervous habit that seemed to grow worse the longer he lived in the caverns. “Keru,” he said. “Ranul Keru. Lieutenant commander, U.S.S. Enterprise.”

  “You’re Starfleet?” Dax said with a smile.

  “I’m on extended leave.” Keru explained. “I had some . . . personal things to work through.” He’d stayed on the Enterprise for some time after Sean’s death three years ago, but found little joy in stellar cartography anymore. The entire ship had become too painful a reminder of all he had lost.

  Keru saw no need to share any of that with Dax, however, especially given the present circumstances.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” Dax told him. “You might make things go easier. If you don’t mind, I’d like you with me when I speak to whoever’s in charge here.”

  “I’ll be happy to provide any help I can, especially if it’ll help rein in the madness out there.” He swept his arm to the side, ushering her toward the cave entrance.

  * * *

  As she descended the winding stone stairs alongside Keru, Dax reflected that it had been five years since her last visit to the winding catacombs of Mak’ala. No, not my visit, the part of her symbiosis that was Ezri Tigan reminded her. Despite the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of the dark, rough-hewn rock faces, the high, igneous stone ceilings and dripping stalactites, and the bubbling, geothermally heated pools of mineral-rich water, she knew that all her memories of this place had come from Jadzia Dax and previous hosts.

  The thing that struck her most viscerally was the tomblike darkness of so much of the place, which was lit only in the most strategic and necessary places, mainly along the stone stairways and near the frothy gray symbiont breeding pools. The blackness that enclosed the rest of the vast underground spaces felt oppressive and tomblike. Ben Sisko had angrily confronted her shortly after Ezri had become joined to Dax, telling her she could always retreat to this place to live out a challenge-free existence should life in Starfleet prove too difficult for her.

  But it was clear to her now that the oppressive nature of Mak’ala, along with the obvious stolid toughness of the Guardians to whom Keru had introduced her—they were single-mindedly dedicated people who seemed to spare no effort in the constant monitoring and testing of the nutrient and mineral content of the symbiont breeding pools—demonstrated that this was no place for the weak. As Keru conducted her to a small natural dais near one of the larger pools, she reflected that it must take a special sort of person indeed to devote his entire life to the care of the symbionts, while at the same time being forever denied the benefits of joining.

  When was the last time any of these people went outside and got any sun? she wondered as Keru briefly excused himself to summon his order’s leaders. While waiting for her guide to return, Dax watched as a pair of younger Guardians received a patient lesson in acidity adjustment from an old woman who knelt beside the nearest pool, dipping sampling tubes into the gently lapping gray waves. Several unjoined symbionts breached then, momentarily sending crackling latticeworks of energy across the rippling surface before disappearing once again down below. The old woman smiled in evident satisfaction, as though the symbionts had just spoken directly to her, peer to peer.

  It occurred to Dax that maybe they had. Maybe the Guardians enjoyed a relationship with the symbionts that the joined could never understand. As far as she knew, no joined person had ever served as a Guardian. Perhaps after communing with the symbionts as the Guardians did, one lost all desire or capacity for joining. Perhaps selecting one path—either joining or the Order of the Guardians—forever rendered the other inaccessible.

  Her reveries were interrupted by the return of Keru, who accompanied six pale, dour-faced, robed men and women ranging in age from late middle age to elderly, whom Keru introduced generically as the Order’s senior leadership. They seemed preoccupied and unwilling to spend much time in conversation, as Timor had been five years earlier. Just as she had feared, the Guardian leaders were hesitant to answer direct questions about the early history of Trill joinings, the parasites, or the lost joined Trill colony that the neo-Purists claimed had once existed on Kurl. Her explanations about the unrest that was flaring up across the planet and the government cover-up allegations recently broadcast by the neo-Purists didn’t seem to move them.

  What are they so determined to hide? she wondered. Well aware of how ingrained Trill secrecy was, she had to consider the possibility that they might not even know the secrets they seemed so determined to protect.

  Ranul Keru, with the assistance of a young male Guardian who introduced himself as Rantic Lan, took up the pleading on her behalf, conferring with the senior Guardians on one of the cave plateaus out of Dax’s earshot. The other Guardians kept a wary eye on her from a distance, as if afraid she might suddenly jump into one of the pools.

  I wonder what Timor told them? she thought. He had been the one who had allowed Jadzia to enter the pools five years ago, after she had learned the truth about the Dax symbiont’s temporary joining to Joran more than a century earlier. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Timor among the Guardians gathered here today. Had he been fired or transferred for aiding Jadzia?

  Several silent minutes later, Keru and the senior Guardians approached her. The eldest of them, a woman whose face and spots were almost indistinguishably pallid from lack of sunlight, approached Dax closely.

  “What you have told us is troubling, Ezri Dax,” she said. “Troubling not just because of the unrest it causes our people now, but also because it incites a distrust between Trill humanoids and symbionts. Our memories, our history, our truth . . . these are the foundations of our society, and of joining itself.”

  The old woman paused, looking uncomfortable, then continued. “But we cannot help you. We cannot concern ourselves with anything other than caring for the symbionts.”

  “Do I really have to point out that it’ll be impossible for you to keep doing that—caring for the symbionts, I mean—if this place gets overrun by neo-Purist radicals?” Dax said dryly.

  Dax noticed that Rantic Lan’s expression was downcast and defeated. Keru walked away from his superiors, coming to a stop facing the nearest pool, his back turned. Damn. Even he’s given up.

  Then, as the six Guardian leaders began to disperse to their various tasks, the normally placid back-and-

  forth wave action of the pool suddenly became tumultuous. Three, then four symbionts breached the pool’s gray surface simultaneously, followed immediately by a dozen more. The senior Guardians stopped in their tracks, transfixed. Jagged forks of lightninglike discharges sprouted, connecting each of the symbionts to one another. And to Keru.

  The big man turned to face Dax again. “It seems my superiors have just been overruled. I think your questions are going to be answered.”

  Dax’s heart leaped into her throat. “What do I have to do?”

  A beatific smile spread across Keru’s lips. “Just swim to the very bottom of the pools. Where nobody’s ever gone before.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Keru stood by the side of the pool, checking the seals on Dax’s environmental suit, retrieved from her runabout. He knew the suits were rated for marine operations and considerable pressures, but he had never been involved in putting those claims to the test. “You know this might not work, right?”

  “I have to try,” she replied.

  “That sounds like something my partner used to say just before doing brave but foolish things. Be careful,” Keru said. Before his death during a Borg attack, Sean had been utterly fearless, whether facing holodeck pirates, scary alien cuisine, cloaked Romulan weapons, or the Borg.

  Dax smiled back at him. “Speaking of which, if I don’t make it back, you’ll give Julian my message. Right?”

  Keru felt a lump forming in h
is throat and his eyes misted involuntarily. “You’ll come back . . . . Just watch the time. As you make your descent, you’ll be racing against your air supply and the rising water pressure—not to mention whatever besides the symbionts might be living down there in the deepest pools.”

  Dax took a deep breath, then waded knee-deep into the grayish murk of the pool. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  “Hurry back. I’ll be waiting.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Since you’ve got a Starfleet background, I suggest you get out there with Cyl and make sure these caves are well defended for my triumphant return.” She gestured to the phalanx of Guardians that ringed one side of the pool, watching her intently. “And try to make sure none of the protesters out there get hurt too badly.”

  “Yes, sir,” Keru said with a grim smile. Then he watched Dax move deliberately toward the center of the pool.

  10

  Dax waded slowly out into the pool’s grayish-white, almost milky water, allowing it to engulf her environmental suit. The nutrient-rich fluid soon splashed against the faceplate of her helmet as she moved deliberately forward, and moments later the water rose to cover her head entirely. After she was fully submerged, the ragged sound of her own breathing reverberated within her bubble helmet—much too loudly, she thought.

  As she drifted free in the murky water, she could see at least half a dozen symbionts swimming energetically near the pool’s surface, while several arced gracefully about her body. Their tranquil blue static-electrical discharges linked each of them together every few seconds, and provided illumination as the cavern lights faded quickly with the increasing distance of the pool’s surface. Occasionally, one of the symbionts’ static bursts would gently reach out to her abdomen, no doubt speaking directly to the Dax symbiont on some level that bypassed symbiosis itself. Though the communication was entirely wordless, these brief psionic touches filled her with feelings of peace and reassurance, and evoked flashes of comforting colors, sounds, and even smells and tastes. If the Guardians experienced such things regularly, she could certainly understand why they showed such dedication to their charges.

  Placing a gloved hand near her suit’s neck ring, she opened up a comm channel. “Dax to Cyl,” she said, her voice echoing strangely inside her helmet.

  “Cyl here,” came the general’s static-laced reply. Evidently the jamming signals that had disrupted the runabout’s communications weren’t extending into the depths of Mak’ala, at least at the moment. “How’s your descent going, Lieutenant?”

  She glanced at the glowing display on the tricorder mounted on her right gauntlet. “So far so good, as long as ‘down’ is the right general direction.” A loud rush of static assailed her ears for a moment, then abruptly faded to the background. “But I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep this channel open.”

  “Understood. I guess I don’t need to remind you to be careful.”

  After she signed off, Dax’s boots came to the edge of a steep drop-off. She stepped over it, pushing her legs hard against the precipice to ensure that her body would fall well clear of it. The bottom of the submerged cavern fell away beneath her, prompting a momentary surge of fear; it was as though she were tumbling, untethered and in slow motion, into one of the icy crevasses on Minos Korva. She was surrounded by an allencompassing darkness broken only by the navigational data scrolling across her tricorder’s display. She recognized the silence that enfolded her as the absence of all sound, both inside and outside of her helmet.

  The symbionts who were escorting her began to withdraw, but before they moved back toward the surface, each of them touched her with an electrical tendril. A moment later she was alone, floating in the stygian gloom.

  In spite of the darkness and the isolation, she wasn’t afraid. Although the symbionts had not communicated with her verbally, their meaning seemed crystal clear to her. They aren’t abandoning me. They want me to continue downward, but they can’t—or know they mustn’t?—go below this point.

  Another thought, less benign, occurred to her: They don’t know what’s down here any more than I do.

  As the weighted belt that encircled her waist drew her steadily downward, she tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the water was far warmer than the Minos Korvan caverns had been, no doubt because of the upwellings of the underground hot springs that helped sustain the symbionts.

  She also noticed that the increasingly viscous water seemed to be fighting her, almost as though Mak’ala itself were trying to reject her presence, like a Trill humanoid entering the throes of neural shock following a badly executed symbiosis.

  She glanced again at her wrist-mounted sensor display. As far as she could tell, the dark cavern into which she was descending was bottomless; she knew that at some point her suit would no longer be able to take the pressure.

  Keep breathing, she thought, concentrating on taking normal, shallow breaths. Not for the first time, she wondered if Julian hadn’t been right when he’d tried to tell her that she was embarking on a fool’s errand. Why did he have to be right so damned often?

  Just as she was about to activate her suit’s wrist lights, she glimpsed a dim, orange-green glow lining a nearby cavern wall. Her tricorder identified it as a colony of bioluminescent microorganisms, evidently growing out of a side channel that appeared to be an ancient, partially collapsed lava tube. As she watched the mat of glowing microbes, the pool’s currents carried some of its tentacle-like fronds away from the wall and toward the surface. Maybe this is what they eat when they’re living down here unjoined, Ezri thought, finding it curious that she couldn’t recall the Dax symbiont’s experiences in the caverns with any degree of detail. Maybe the symbionts don’t share everything when they join with us.

  That thought made her more determined than ever to continue her descent. To get to the bottom of things, as it were.

  Ignoring the protest of the burned skin on her hand, she checked her navigational data again, then touched her comm button again. “Cyl, I’m continuing my descent. I think I’m finally getting close to the cavern floor.”

  She heard only hissing and crackling in response as her comm signal tried and failed to negotiate the magmafed, ionrich water and Mak’ala’s fistrium-laden cavern walls. Looks like I’m on my own down here, she thought, swallowing hard.

  Her boots suddenly found purchase on the stony and steeply sloping bottom, and Dax finally activated her suit’s powerful helmet lights in the hope of actually seeing where she was headed, as opposed to relying entirely upon her tricorder. The soupy miasma all around her swallowed most of the light before it got more than a few meters away in any direction. Despite the limited visibility, Dax caught glimpses of the pool’s rocky walls, and noted that they were narrowing as the passage descended ever deeper through Trill’s volcanic crust.

  As she dropped slowly into the increasingly claustrophobic passage, she recalled the Dax symbiont’s experience inside the mysterious “cathedral artifact” the Defiant’s crew had discovered in the Gamma Quadrant. Ezri and Dax had been separated for a short time, and the unjoined Dax symbiont experienced a horrific, solitary vision that Ezri Dax now recognized as a premonition of the recent parasite attack on Trill. This unsettling encounter had brought the symbiont face-to-face with all of its previous hosts, each of whom had carried dire, oracular warnings—and had accused Dax of negligence in preparing for what was to come. Dax had surmised that the mystical, almost nightmarish experience had been precipitated as much by symbiotic interruption as by Audrid’s painful memories of the alien thing that taken the life of poor Jayvin.

  Dax’s boots settled at last to almost level ground, and she saw that the passage had narrowed to the point that her suit lights had no trouble illuminating the walls in any direction; every crack and crevice stood out in sharp relief. As she moved forward, half walking and half swimming, the passage wound and twisted and narrowed until she thought the wide upper portion of her environmental suit might get her stuck.
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br />   Any symbiont that manages to make it this far down has got to be hunchbacked, she thought with no small amount of gallows humor. Even if she were able to raise Cyl or the runabout’s computer, she knew that an emergency beam-out to the Rio Grande would have a very low probability of success. The very geological features that protected the symbionts in the caverns from long-distance transporter kidnappings would kill her if she were to become trapped down here.

  Dax continued following the tunnel’s gentle downward slope for perhaps another twenty minutes, her suit’s metal-ribbed shoulders scraping disconcertingly from time to time against the sides of what had become a nearly horizontal tube of fluid-filled rock. For several minutes, she was literally crawling on her belly through yet another ancient lava tube. On top of this difficulty, the steadily increasing water pressure was pushing relentlessly against her suit, making its joints stiff and unyielding. Her thighs and arms ached with exertion, and exhaustion was threatening to overwhelm her. Still, her suit sensors indicated that something—something alive and symbiont-like—lay an indeterminate distance ahead.

  Fortunately, one of her helmet lights revealed what appeared to be a ledge only a few meters ahead. Beyond that ledge lay what looked like another one of Mak’ala’s large, open pools. A gentle current seemed to be pulling her in that direction. She heaved a sigh of relief at the prospect of getting out of the narrow passage soon.