Obviously panicked by Bashir’s startled reaction, the “lieutenant” raised his weapon.

“Ezri, shoot through Talris!” Bashir yelled as he pushed Cyl down, diving for the floor himself.

A bright burst of light sizzled through the air and struck Talris in the chest, coring a hole through him. The “lieutenant” behind him fell backward, and both crumpled limply to the floor.

Cyl sprinted across the room and dived on top of the fallen infiltrator, but the man’s body was limp and lifeless.

Ezri ran forward as well, joining Bashir as he squatted to examine Talris. “Did I…?” She couldn’t finish her question.

Bashir shook his head. “No. He was already dead. I suspect that he died at about the time we reached the outer hall. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I knew for certain.” He pointed to the mortal phaser wound on the senator’s right temple.

“You took one hell of a chance,” Cyl said, his voice flinty. He paused to recover the phasers that he and Bashir had been forced to drop. “What if he wasn’t dead?”

As Cyl brusquely tossed him his weapon, Bashir fixed the general with a testy gaze. Ever since his arrival on Trill, he had been either brushed off or ignored. He’d finally had enough of it.

“I don’t takechances like that, General. I knew he was already dead. And I knew that his symbiont was gone as well, or its life signs would have shown up earlier on Lieutenant Dax’s plisagraph.”

Ezri stood, her attention diverted to something off to the side. “I believe we have another problem,” she said, pointing. “I think that’s a bomb.”

Bashir and Cyl scrambled to their feet and looked over to where Ezri was pointing. There, atop the very same hovercart they had seen earlier, sat a two-meter-long metal cylinder. The tarp that had once covered it lay on the floor, demonstrating that stealth no longer mattered to the radicals. The device was connected via ODN cables to a bank of machinery set into a nearby wall.

Bashir followed Cyl and Ezri as they made their deliberate approach to the device. Unfortunately, a visual examination of the object revealed very little.

“So we don’t know whether it’s a bomb or not,” Cyl said. Bashir could hear an edge in the general’s voice; he clearly feared the worst.

“What else would it be?” Ezri said. “Think about it. If they bomb the Senate Tower, they could cripple the planetary government for months. Radicals and terrorists often see these sorts of actions as catalysts for whatever changes they want to bring about. And that dead man back there was awfully eager to get out of here.”

Safely, and without any more unpleasantness,Bashir thought, recalling some of the dead man’s final words.

Still, he searched for another explanation. “Maybe it’s some kind of device designed to hijack the communications grid from the speaker’s platform. If this facility is used for making planetwide addresses, that might be a good way for the radicals to focus attention on their cause.”

“Believe me, Doctor,” Cyl said. “They already have almost everyone’s undivided attention. Besides, I don’t think they’d go to this much trouble just to do that. They can already broadcast their own messages on the comnet, and they wouldn’t have to kill a beloved senator to do it. Lieutenant Dax is right—our safest assumption is that this is a bomb.”

“Okay, so how do you suppose it’s triggered?” Ezri asked, pacing from one end of the device to the other. “If it’s on a timer, how do we know how much time is left? And how do we disarm it?”

“I’m going to call for an evacuation,” Cyl said, moving over to a wall-mounted comm unit. “We’ll try to save as many lives as we can.”

Knowing the loss of life could still be enormous should the object detonate, Bashir’s mind worked to find a better solution even as the general barked orders through the comm unit. Sifting through his memories, the doctor could find very few that related to bomb threats. Such things were almost unheard of on Federation planets, especially bombings conducted for political purposes. It didn’t escape him that conflicts were sometimes decided instead through large-scale engagements involving starships and phasers and cloned soldiers and shape-shifters and mind-devouring parasites; the idea of planting a lone bomb seemed almost quaint by comparison.

How would I get rid of a bomb back on the station?he asked himself. I’d beam it into deep space. But we can’t do that here.

Or can we?

He turned toward Cyl. “Is this thing attached to any of the building’s critical systems?”

Gard shrugged. Cyl snorted. “I wouldn’t know for sure,” the general said. “This isn’t exactly my arena.”

“Then I suppose there’s no point in waiting any longer.” Tapping his Starfleet combadge, he said, “Bashir to Rio Grande.”

“Rio Grande acknowledging,”the runabout’s computer responded in an affectless female voice.

Ezri stepped closer. “Julian, are you sure this is a good idea?”

“I don’t think we have a lot of alternatives, Ezri.” Or time to argue about it.

She nodded, apparently having come to a command decision. “You’re probably right. Go ahead.”

He picked the combadge off the front of his uniform and spoke quickly into it. “Computer, lock the transporter onto my combadge. Program a five-second delay, then transport the large metal object to which it’s attached.”

“Please specify transporter coordinates.”

Setting the combadge atop the mystery device, Bashir said. “Deep space. Directly overhead. Maximum range.”

As Bashir backed quickly away from the object, Ezri approached Cyl. “General, I think you’ll want to warn your defense crew. They’ll probably detect a good-sized explosion in orbit.”

Cyl moved back to the comm unit and activated it. “This is General Cyl. Warn every orbiting ship to raise shields or break orbit. Immediately.”

“Energizing,”said the runabout’s computer, speaking from the unknown object’s hull. A moment later, a shimmering curtain of light enveloped the device, and it disappeared from view.

Bashir let out his breath in a whoosh. He hadn’t even been aware he had been holding it. He opened his tricorder, swiftly entered some figures into the keypad, then raised the device to make its display clearly visible to Cyl.

“General, tell your ships to scan these coordinates for an explosion. If they don’t find one, have them search for that device. And make sure they destroy it.”

A grim smile came to Cyl’s lips. “Well done, Doctor. We’ll find out soon enough if—” He stopped and whirled into a crouch, his phaser raised and trained on the hall entrance from which they had originally emerged into the room.

Bashir saw a head peep around the wall just before a familiar voice called out. “Stand down, General. It’s Gard and Trebor. We’ve eliminated or captured all the other infiltrators who’d gotten into the building.”

At least the ones who were wearing uniforms or got caught committing assassinations or planting bombs,Bashir thought, wondering just how many unjoined radical sympathizers had quiet office jobs in the Senate Tower or countless other government sector buildings.

Cyl lowered his weapon, and moments later, Hiziki Gard and another military man stepped into the room. The second man—Trebor—was limping.

“What’s the situation here?” Gard asked.

“We’ve neutralized all of them,” Cyl said. “Including the man who was evidently leading this particular group.” He paused, gesturing toward the senator’s lifeless body. “They killed Talris, and installed what we believe to be some kind of explosive device here. Doctor Bashir used his ship’s transporter to beam the device into space.”

“Do we know what kind of bomb it was?” Gard asked.

“We don’t even know for sure if it wasa bomb,” Ezri said. “But we couldn’t afford to take any chances.”