“Are you sure you’re all right?” Julian asked, concern striating his forehead. Dax wondered if he had noticed the same thing about Taran’atar that she had.

“My injuries are trivial, and I heal very quickly,” said the Jem’Hadar, sounding annoyed, either at the situation or at himself for having fallen in the first place. “Let us resume our search for the parasite nest. You needn’t waste any more time or attention on me.”

“A way into the underground chamber we identified from orbit is less than fifty meters from here,” Ro said, once again intent on her tricorder’s display. If not for Taran’atar’s accident—and the abundance of scan-reflective refractory minerals present in most of the surface rocks—the team would doubtless have reached its goal a good half hour earlier.

“Good news, Lieutenant,” Julian said. Turning his attention back to Vlu, he added, “Maybe we can get you warmed up once we get belowground.”

“That sounds positively lovely,” Vlu said, as more uncontrollable shudders seized her. “In the meantime, would you remind me again why I agreed to come along on this little junket?”

Dax felt her own teeth beginning to chatter, perhaps in sympathy with Vlu’s predicament. Smiling, she said, “Because you said you didn’t want me to have to do all the griping myself.”

Vlu smiled in response, apparently warmed by Dax’s gentle humor. “What is that expression some of you Starfleet people are so fond of using? ‘It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it’?”

“Precisely,” Dax said, returning Vlu’s smile. As the group resumed moving forward, her thoughts darkened. After all, the real reason for bringing Vlu along was starkly apparent to the entire group: the away team had to include members who wouldn’t be vulnerable to being biologically co-opted by the parasites; an earlier failed attempt by one of the creatures to infect Gul Akellen Macet had demonstrated that Cardassians, like Jem’Hadar, were incompatible with the parasites’ physiology and thus completely resistant to their influence.

The fact that the Cardassians and the Jem’Hadar weren’t first cousins to such monsters made Dax experience another stab of envy. To put that thought out of her mind, she once again considered their mission’s twin goals: to find out precisely how and where Bajor’s late first minister, Shakaar Edon, had been attacked by the hellish aliens who had very nearly brought destruction to the Trill homeworld; and to make certain that no more of the creatures still lurked in the deep places of Minos Korva, despite the enigmatic assurances of her oldest friend, Benjamin Sisko, who had returned after an eight-month absence from the linear continuum.

After a few more minutes of walking, Ro—who had remained at the head of the tethered procession—came to a stop. The rest of the team followed suit as Ro gestured with her tricorder toward the heavily shadowed cavern entrance that lay ahead.

“Here it is,” Ro said. “Everybody ready?”

Dax’s eyes darted from face to face, starting with Julian, who apparently wasn’t trying to hide his trepidation over coming to this place. She glanced next at Vlu, who looked similarly discomfited, evidently as much by the cold as by whatever might await them below the icy surface of Minos Korva. Only Ro and Taran’atar appeared impassive, the former’s pale Bajoran features evidently schooled to give nothing away, the latter’s stony visage all but incapable of expressing anything recognizable, other than the most primal of emotions.

Ro activated an intense wrist-mounted light. Then she raised her phaser, as did Taran’atar. “Then let’s go,” she said.

The lights revealed a pile of icy rocks and scree that formed a crude stairway leading down into the shadows. The team moved forward, their lights pushing the darkness into full retreat. Soon the frozen crust of Minos Korva completely enclosed them, and still they walked downward, following a winding, narrow passageway. The icy rock walls were encrusted with mineral formations that revealed a panoply of subdued colors under the team’s moving wrist lights; Dax noted shades ranging from dull milky opals to ugly grayish pinks. The place seemed to be a hideous parody of the Caves of Mak’ala, where the Order of the Guardians carefully tended the breeding pools of the Trill symbionts.

Moving with deliberate steps, the group pressed forward, darkness enveloping them entirely except for their wrist lights. The ice beneath their feet gave way to a moraine of gravel. The gentle slope of the progressively narrowing passageway confirmed what Dax’s inner ear had already told her: they were continuing to move steadily downward. For uncountable minutes, she forced herself to concentrate on her footing as they continued making their slow descent. She almost succeeded in not thinking about what might lay ahead.

But not quite. “Anything on the tricorder?” Dax asked Ro. Her voice cast eerie multiple echoes against the cavern walls.

“I’m reading minute DNA traces on some of the rock faces,” the Bajoran said, neither lowering her wrist light nor turning to look back in Dax’s direction as she spoke.

“Confirmed,” Vlu said, consulting her own tricorder, her earlier discomfort now apparently forgotten. “Some of them are Bajoran.”

Julian’s tricorder issued three sharp beeps. “More specifically, they’re Shakaar’s,” he said.

Ro grunted an affirmation. “Shakaar was a resistance leader long before he became a politician. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. I don’t wonder that he left some of his own blood behind.”

Not that fighting would have done much good against even one infected host,Dax thought grimly, recalling how the creature that had possessed Jayvin had made him both preternaturally strong and invulnerable to all but the most intense phaser settings.

The team continued forward and the passageway abruptly widened around them. Dax noticed that Taran’atar had stopped walking only when she nearly ran into Vlu’s back. The Jem’Hadar was slowly craning his head from left to right, scowling as he scrutinized the broad chamber.

“Turn off your light, Lieutenant,” Taran’atar said as he extinguished his own.

“Are you crazy?” Ro said.

Taran’atar betrayed no sign of having been offended. “Indulge me for a moment.”

Through the weird shadows cast by Ro’s twin lights, Dax could see her own skepticism mirrored on the security chief’s face. Leaving her own wrist beacon dark, Dax quietly moved her hand toward her phaser. What if hedid somehow fall under the influence of a stray parasite while he was alone under the ice?

“All right,” Ro said, scowling at Taran’atar. “But this had better be good.”

Dax heard a click, then saw nothing but blackness punctuated by bright retinal afterimages of Ro’s wrist light. The spots before Dax’s eyes lingered for a protracted moment before yielding to the stygian gloom. She drew her phaser.

“All right,” Ro said tartly. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

Then Dax saw it: a wan, greenish-yellow glow that seemed to ooze from every pore of the passage’s rough-hewn walls. Meandering horizontal grooves in the passage glowed more brightly than the surrounding stone, forming crude lines that seemed to beckon the team forward. The chill, stale air stank of death and corruption.

Dax wanted to run, but she forced herself to remain where she was. Before her lay what might well have been the last sight that met Shakaar’s eyes before his parasite-infected Minos Korvan hosts led him down here to face an unimaginably horrible fate.

And she knew that she had seen these phosphorescent striations—and their sickly, bilious glow—before. No, not me,Dax reminded herself as her eyes began to adjust more fully to the darkness. Those memories belonged to Audrid.

She walked toward Ro, whose tricorder readout shone as bright as a welding torch in the surrounding gloom. “Life signs?”