“Nothing definite,” Ro said. “But the material in these rock faces seems to be the product of some sort of biological process.”

Julian was moving his tricorder along one of the chamber’s faintly glowing walls. “Bioluminescence. But whatever produced it no longer appears to be active.”

“I would estimate that it died on the order of five weeks ago,” said Vlu, studying the glowing face of her own tricorder. “The bioluminescence we’re seeing now is simply a residual effect of life processes that have ceased.”

“Can you be sure of that?” Dax asked, addressing both doctors at once. “What about the refractory mineral interference we noticed earlier? Couldn’t that be hiding a few live parasites?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Julian said. “Those minerals appear to be most heavily concentrated in the surface layers, as geologically unlikely as that sounds.”

“Then perhaps it has more to do with tactics than with geology,” Taran’atar said, his rich voice reverberating in the large darkened chamber.

Dax frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The parasites may have deliberately scattered those minerals on the surface, hoping to conceal their exact whereabouts. Since that time, they may have either left or died.”

“Makes sense to me,” Ro said, then raised her phaser. “Still, I’m not going to take any chances.”

“I agree,” Vlu said. “I’d feel a good deal better if we could actually find some dead parasites here. That would tend to prove that the entire hive died when the main reproducing female was killed.”

“At the very least, we have to verify that this…nest is empty,” Julian said, nodding.

Despite the wan light, Dax could see that Ro was turning in a complete circle, her tricorder raised. “I’m all for that,” Ro said. “The question is, where exactly do we look?”

Dax’s eyes flitted back to the cave walls, whose glowing, veinlike markings now seemed to call to her, even as they continued to churn up some of Audrid’s most painful memories.

“This way,” she said. She began moving forward, following the faintly glowing lines in the stone—

—and she was once again deep inside the frozen comet where more than a century ago Audrid, her husband Jayvin Vod, and a Starfleet team had encountered the first parasite, a creature whose genetic makeup and biological processes had scanned as so similar to those of the Trill symbionts. How excited Audrid been at the prospect of exploring that relationship, perhaps even discovering the long-debated origin of Trill symbiosis.

But that wasn’t what happened.

Quicker than any predator Audrid had ever seen, the creature launched itself through the faceplate of Jayvin’s environmental suit. It didn’t take long for the thing to hijack the body, intellect, and soul—both humanoid and symbiont—of the man who had fathered Audrid’s children.

Speaking through the enslaved Jayvin, the creature referred to itself as “the taker of gist,” and called the inhabitants of Trill—its genetic cousins—“the weak ones.” It said it was paving the way for the arrival of countless others of its kind, creatures whose only desire was the indiscriminate destruction of the Trill. It called the comet a “ship,” sending it on a Trill-ward trajectory using directed surface outgassing—a process evidently mediated by the “veins,” the creature’s term for the multitude of branching lines that scored the comet’s complex network of interior passages.

Ezri Dax stared in fascination at the “veins” as she continued leading the group toward whatever lay at the nest’s center. Though she found the striations disturbing, she also found she was having great difficulty looking away from them. She reflected that the markings here couldn’t have fulfilled the same function as those Audrid and Jayvin had found inside the comet so long ago; rather than steering the parasites toward their intended victims, perhaps the lines here served as lures for the humanoid pawns they needed in order to bring their inexplicable hatred to fruition on Trill.

If this place were still full of live creepy-crawlies, we might all be helpless or dead by now,Dax thought. Maybe even Vlu and Taran’atar.

The group came to a stop before a raised, rocky formation that appeared to have been thrust up from the stone floor eons ago; the natural structure stood about a meter high and vaguely resembled a cylindrical altar. A small basin had been carved into the top face of the stone; it was filled with a congealing, half-frozen mass of viscous, faintly glowing material.

Dr. Juarez, the xenobiologist from Fleet Captain Pike’s Starfleet team, stood before the rocky basin where the mysterious entity lay below a gleaming sheet of cometary ice. “There’s a life-form of some kind in there…complex arrangement, carbon-based, it should be frozen, but…I can’t get an exact size, it seems to be shifting—”

Run!Ezri Dax shrieked from behind an impermeable veil of memory. But these were Audrid’s recollections, not hers. There was nothing she could do to change what was about to happen.

“Between eight and twelve centimeters long,” Juarez continued, studying his tricorder closely. “And according to this, it’s at least four thousand years old.”

Audrid knew from the far more precise scans that she and Jayvin had already performed that the creature was actually at least two millennia older than that—

Ro reactivated her wrist lamp, forcing the glowing striations to vanish from Dax’s sight. Once again, Dax blinked rapidly as dark spots briefly danced before her dazzled eyes.

Ro bent over the fetid mass inside the basin, inspecting it.

“No!” Dax shouted.

Something shot out of the ice-covered pool, something small and dark. Simultaneously, the liquid’s frozen surface splintered into innumerable flechette-like shards.

Jayvin staggered back silently, engulfed in the horrible glow, the atmosphere venting from his environmental suit’s shattered helmet in a rapidly crystallizing halo—

Audrid saw Jayvin turn and snatch a phaser from the grip of one of Pike’s security officers. Jayvin shoved the man down, shattering his helmet. Then he raised the weapon and fired—

Audrid Dax knew she had lost Jayvin Vod forever.

Dax suddenly realized that everyone was staring at her, their wrist lamps throwing bizarre, tentacular shadows across the chamber.

“Ezri,” Julian called, his voice tinged with worry. He approached, his medical tricorder pointed toward her. “Are you all right?”

Damn. Damn. Damn!

“I’m fine, Julian. You can put that away. What’s the verdict on the life signs?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant,” Vlu said carefully, as though she were repeating herself. “We found the remains of several parasites in the pool, but none were still alive.”

Dax felt a rush of relief at the news. Then she noticed that Julian had not yet put his tricorder away. He was continuing to scan her.

“Really, Julian, I’m fine.”

He paused his scan, scowled at the tricorder display, then closed the instrument. Fixing her with a piercing stare, he said, “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

She felt her hackles rise. Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone? “You tell me, Julian. I’m sure it’s nothing your tricorder can’t pick up.”

“This is one of those times when my instincts are telling me more than my tricorder can. You cried out as though you were having a nightmare. Or reliving a traumatic memory.”

“We’ve already established that the parasites possess limited telepathic abilities,” Vlu said. “Perhaps their decomposing nervous tissue can exert some residual influence on members of related species.” The Cardassian doctor’s gaze momentarily lit upon Dax’s abdomen as if to underscore the close relationship that existed between the symbionts and the alien parasites. Dax frowned silently at the unspoken comparison.