THE SYMBIONTS WHO WERE

ESCORTING EZRI 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.

She noticed that the increasingly viscous water seemed to be fighting her, almost as though Mak’ala itself was trying to reject her presence.

She glanced 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 shareeverything 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.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Planet art by Geoff Mandel

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Trill

Unjoined

Andy Mangels and

Michael A. Martin

About the Authors

Andy Mangels is the coauthor of several Star Treknovels, e-books, short stories, and comic books, as well as a trio of Roswellnovels, all cowritten with Michael A. Martin. Flying solo, he is the best-selling author of many entertainment books including Animation on DVD: The Ultimate Guideand Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Characters,as well as a significant number of entries in The Super-Hero Book.

He has written hundreds of articles for entertainment and lifestyle magazines and newspapers in the United States, England, and Italy. He has also written licensed material based on properties from many film studios and Microsoft, and his comic book work has been published by DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and many others. He was the editor of the award-winning Gay Comicsanthology for eight years.

Andy is a national award-winning activist in the Gay community, and has raised thousands of dollars for charities over the years. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his long-term partner, Don Hood, their dog Bela, and their chosen son, Paul Smalley. Visit his website at www.andymangels.com