“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 his 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 all-encompassing 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 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.

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 magma-fed, ion-rich 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.