Then she heard a sharp click, coming from somewhere inside her suit. The whine of the heat exchangers ceased at once, and the acrid tang of ozone assaulted her nostrils. A key circuit or relay had probably burned out, and there was no way to change it down here, or even to reach it.

A glance at her sensor display confirmed the worst. Her suit couldn’t sustain life support for even a fraction of the time it would take for her to swim back to the surface. Soon, she would literally cook inside her own environmental suit. And she still couldn’t call Cyl for a rescue. This excursion and the revelations she had experienced had all been in vain.

Clenching her burned hand into a fist, she decided that this was a perfect occasion for one of Curzon’s highly inventive curses.

12

“What do you meanno one has been able to find President Maz?” Gard yelled into his communicator as he dashed down the corridor.

“Exactly what I said, Mister Gard,”Colonel Rianu said, her voice sounding slightly tinny as it issued from the comm device’s small speaker. “We’re having more and more communications blackouts. We lost contact with the president’s contingent five minutes ago.”

“Was she warned about the bomb threats? Is she en route to one of the emergency bunkers?” As Gard neared the turbolift, he held his phaser in his free hand, his finger hovering over the triggering button just in case anyone else had infiltrated the Senate Tower.

“We tried,”Rianu said. “We think Commander Grekel heard our warnings before we were cut off. We—Hold on.”

Gard saw the colonel’s face turn from the tiny monitor, and heard her conversing in low tones with her subordinates. Her brows knitted in anger as she turned back to him.

“Two search teams have found additional bombs in the vicinity. One was in the Najana Library, and another one was near the shuttle docking station on Maran Avenue. They’re attempting to disarm them now.”

Gard pressed the button for the turbolift. “Do we know what kind of bombs they are?”

“Negative,”Rianu said, shaking her head, her gaze focused off-screen. “The scans have been inconclusive so far.”She paused and listened for a bit. “I’m told there are traces of some kind of radiation, but we can’t analyze it on the spot. We’re going to try beaming them out as soon as we can get site-to-site transporter stanchions in place.”

The turbolift doors opened, and Gard prepared to step inside. “I suspect more of these devices have been planted around Leran Manev. Until we know what they can do, it might be best to evacuate as many people as possible from the central districts. We should get key officials to radiation-shielded facilities as quickly as possible.”

Colonel Rianu’s reply was lost in a sudden haze of static.

Jirin Tambor checked his chronometer for the eighteenth time in the last few minutes. The pain suppressants in his system were doing a good job of keeping him from noticing the progress of the bloodborne malignancy that was attacking his heart muscle, consuming him layer by layer from the inside. But they did little to quell the nervousness and trepidation he was feeling at the moment.

He paced in front of the neurogenic device quietly, careful not to let his footfalls be heard. Though the building was closed to the public for the night, it was still possible that someone might happen upon him in time to stop what he was doing. The other members of his cell had already left. He didn’t blame them; he had chosento stay behind.

My life is over anyhow. Weeks or days or minutes. It doesn’t matter now.He had already said good-bye to all of his friends and what family he had left. Most of his family would no longer communicate with him, ever since he had told them he was joining the neo-Purist movement. They, too, were members of the unjoined majority, but had always appeared content with their lives despite the chronic lack of opportunity Tambor now saw as their unjust lot. They hadn’t even been permitted the where-withal to earn university degrees. Given that, why couldn’t more people see what was so glaringly obvious?

“Why involve yourself in all this protest?” his mother had asked him. “What good does it do you to provoke the government? The joined aren’t purposely discriminating against us. You’ve just chosen to interpret every bit of bad luck in the worst possible way.”

But Tambor knew better. His family knew he was sick, but not howsick. They didn’t know what he had learned from his doctors, one of whom had broken a sacred vow to tell him the truth. His chances of survival would be greatly increased if he were joined. A symbiont living in his abdomen could, at least potentially, stop the cancer that was eating him alive. The doctor had tried to backpedal, saying that even joining was no guarantee of recovery. But he couldn’t hide the fact that the joined almost never suffered from this particular condition. And on those rare occasions when they did, no expense seemed to be spared in restoring them to health. Medicines and radiation treatments had already failed Tambor; he knew with bedrock certainty that the slugs would have saved him.

But the Symbiosis Commission would not grant him the right to join, even as an emergency measure to save his life. They had repeatedly denied his requests, until he had exhausted every avenue of appeal.

The malignancy within him was consuming more than his organs; it had removed his inhibitions, chilling a lifetime of carefully observed morality into a glacier of cold rage. Increasingly over the past year, he had noticed the inequities practiced by his government, by the university he attended, and even by the people on the streets. Every advantage possible in life seemed to flow effortlessly toward his world’s charmed few: the joined.

Then he found the neo-Purist movement, and the arguments of its members made sense. As they uncovered more and more hints about Trill’s history, and the past horrors those ancient records had hinted at, he came to understand that something radical would have to be done to right his world’s ingrained wrongs.

Tambor’s cell had received a great deal of information—including rudimentary plans for the neurogenic bombs—from a neo-Purist operative within the government archives. Tambor believed implicitly, as did his fellow revolutionaries, the records claiming that similar neurogenic devices had been used before, in the depths of Trill’s all-but-forgotten past.

And now they will be used again.

Tambor knew his family would be safe, since none of his relatives lived anywhere near the bomb sites. Everyone he cared about would be safe. The bombs were supposed to have little effect upon unjoined persons anyway, except for those unlucky enough to be at extremely close range when the devices detonated. Tambor had decided to take luck out of the equation entirely by remaining at ground zero until the clock ran out.

He checked his chronometer again, then set his hand phaser down on the floor.

Even if somebody were to try to stop me now, there wouldn’t be any time for a fire fight.

Julian Bashir stumbled into the intake room at Manev Central Hospital, holding his tunic sleeve up to his nose to stanch the blood flow.

The place was overflowing with people, though most of them appeared to have suffered relatively minor injuries. The nurses and trauma teams seemed to be doing their best to divide people into groups depending on their needs, ushering the worst cases down the hallways toward what he assumed were medical alcoves and emergency treatment facilities.