A beeping noise sounded from the wall’s comm unit, and then a female voice spoke. “General Cyl, Patrol Vessel TDM-one-twelve reports that a small devicedid just detonate above the atmosphere in the vicinity of the coordinates you specified. They report that it sent out some kind of electromagnetic pulse, but it dissipated before they could analyze it. They say it was more flash than substance, though.”

Bashir smiled grimly. Though the bomb apparently hadn’t been all that powerful, his decision to dispose of it had been correct. Maybe he had finally earned some respect from Cyl and Gard.

“What’s the status of the riot outside?” Cyl said, still speaking into the comm unit.

“The police are keeping the crowds back,”the voice from the wall reported. “But there have been a significant number of injuries and a good deal more violence than we expected.”She hesitated, then resumed. “One of the neo-Purist leaders has sent out a planetwide message on the comnet. It’s going out live right now. We’re recording it and attempting to trace the feed back to its source.”

“I’ll view it in one of the Senate offices,” Cyl said. “In the meantime, send a security team to the prep room behind the speaker’s platform, level three. Senator Talris was murdered here, and his body will need to be transferred to the coroner. Officer Trebor will be here to brief the team when it arrives. And send a general alert to all police and military units to be on the lookout for other bombs that might have been planted in public locations across Trill. Cyl out.”

“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.