“Yes,” Picard drawled. “Mr. Worf, shields down. Subcomander, prepare for beaming.”
“We are prepared.”
Impressed, Spock once again looked at Picard. “How did you know, Captain? Even I was not sure.”
“Because it’s logical, Ambassador,” the captain responded, his dark eyes glinting. “Mr. Data, please scan for human physiology and beam their passenger directly to the bridge.”
“Understood, captain. Transporter room, this is the bridge.”
The android relayed the captain’s orders, and in 4.9 seconds the shaft of glittering energy appeared as expected on the portside deck ramp leading to the captain’s ready room. Spock noted the angle of the ramp and hoped it would cause no trouble or surprise.
As the column of lights coagulated into familiar form, he stepped toward it, then again restrained himself, not wishing to appear too custodial. He was relieved when Mr. Riker stepped to the ramp and put out an assisting hand in anticipation. Another two seconds brought the white-haired, pin-thin form of Leonard McCoy fully onto the bridge, shouldering a simple canvas satchel. The work of the Romulan wing was done.
“Sir, the Tdal is bearing off,” Worf reported immediately. “They are vectoring back toward Romulan space at emergency high warp.”
“Very good—and I don’t blame them,” Picard said. “Stand down from general quarters. Welcome to the Enterprise, Dr. McCoy.”
“Captain Picard, nice to be aboard,” the doctor’s elderly voice scratched. “Can you turn the heat up in here? That Romulan shoebox was cold as a coffin nail. Hi, Spock.”
“Doctor.”
“You’re looking stiff.”
“Thank you.”
“Back trouble?”
“If you like.”
“I brought a big hypodermic needle from my medical antiques collection.”
“A display which ideally fits your personality, I have always reflected.”
“I…ah…all right, I owe you one. Morning, Beverly.”
“Leonard,” the other physician chuckled. “And it’s evening here.”
“Dammit. Why can’t the galaxy just go to Federation Standard Time?”
William Riker smiled again and took McCoy’s sticklike arm in his to escort him down the ramp. Spock resisted the urge to reach out and stop Riker’s robust grip—McCoy’s spidery limbs seemed so frail—then chided himself for his absurdity.
“That was hardly a Tellarite grain ship, Doctor,” he commented instead.
“So I lied. It was the only way I could get a ship with high warp to bring me all the way back. Anything else would’ve taken ten weeks. We don’t have ten weeks.”
“No, we don’t,” Crusher endorsed. “The Romulan royal family is not a dozen people. It’s over a thousand, installed in positions of power all over the empire. How close you are to the current ruler causes a lot of jockeying and marrying and even assassinations, but there’s never been anything like this. This certainly isn’t just some jealous cousin maneuvering for the crown.” She turned specifically to McCoy. “What have you concluded?”
“Concluded? Oh, I did say that in my message yesterday, didn’t I? What I came up with is that the Romulans are right. The infection is definitely man-made. Not an accident.”
“How did you come to this?” Spock asked, careful to phrase the question in a way that would dodge McCoy’s still-youthful barbed humor.
“I’ve made some progress. What else do you expect from a man old enough to call Moses by his first name? Anyway, that’s why I need Beverly’s help.”
“You need my help?” Dr. Crusher asked.
“Hell, yes, I need help. I’m old, all right? Besides, you’re the one who worked on this mess before.”
She regarded him with a gaze startlingly similar to the way Captain Kirk used to regard McCoy. “You mean this Romulan disease is the same multiprion nightmare—?”
“That’s right. The same thing you and Dr. Spencer of the Constitution encountered back on Archaria III. It’s mutated or been artificially mutated. That’s why you haven’t recognized it. It’s been targeted to the genetics of the Romulan royal family.”
Clearly irritated that her victory was being compromised, Crusher scowled. “How did you recognize it if it’s mutated?”
McCoy’s white head bobbed in a nod. “My dear, you remember the line ‘Methinks he doth protest too much’? Well, me have begun to think this infection doth show up too much. Prion-based infections just don’t appear randomly this often, and certainly not in a pattern that leaps from one planet to another, infecting a vastly different DNA makeup. Somebody’s forcing mutations, combining prions that would never hook up naturally, then targeting whole races for infection. This biological terrorism smacks to me of experimentation.”
“My God!” Riker blurted.
Spock heard the exclamation, but was himself focused on the doctor’s unexpected declaration. “Someone is working toward a larger goal? The Romulan royal family is not the target?”
“I don’t think so,” McCoy said. “I don’t think the goal is to kill off the royal family at all. I think they’re being used as an incubation test site. I think the goal is to develop a bioagent that can be neither cured nor treated.”
“Upon what do you base this?”
The doctor’s gravelly voice took on a surge of confidence. “On the same multiprion sickness popping up all over the place, sometimes in isolation, other times in populated areas, but each time with some new aberration. A plague here, a flu there, an infection yonder, a couple of them leaping racial boundaries…until now, nobody’s tied the incidents together; but I’ve seen this kind of thing before on a smaller scale, and I got suspicious. So I started ordering some quiet information gathering about three years ago. And, folks, this isn’t just an epidemic. It’s a pan- demic.”
The word sent a chill through the bridge that Spock found nearly palpable. Even he discovered his hands suddenly clenched and forced himself to control his reaction. Ever since the first armies began forming and moving in the first civilizations on the earliest planets, pandemics had been a far more insidious scourge than any war.
Dr. McCoy paused long enough to see his revelation run its course of shock and nervousness, then enjoyed center stage again.
“When the Romulan royal family popped up with this deadly strain,” he went on, “I started gathering the results of tests all over the quadrant, and sure enough they’ve got enough common characteristics to eliminate either the idea of coincidence or the idea of any other cause. These aren’t dozens of isolated biological occurrences—they’re all mutations of a single strain.”
“So it couldn’t be remnants of genetic testing?” Riker jabbed, leaning a little toward Dr. Crusher.
McCoy swiveled to him. “Genetics? Whoever said that?”
“Nobody said that,” Crusher injected quickly. Her face masked a cold and bottled fury, as a knight’s who had just been told the dragon is still alive. “Did you bring the results of all these tests? I’d like to examine them.”
He patted his satchel. “Along with a cache of Scaffold Mints for the wardroom.”
“As ever,” Spock commented, “you keep your eye on the future.”
“Watch it, pal, or I’ll sit on you and give you a lecture on how long two cockroaches can live off the glue on the back of a postage stamp.”
Dr. Crusher clasped her hands in a manner of controlled anxiety. “Who ever heard of ‘two cockroaches’? Doctor, have you isolated the matrix on this Romulan mutation?”
McCoy’s ancient blue eyes fixed on hers with the zeal of youth. “First thing. And, bless us all, it’s a DNA strain, not RNA, which mans we can beat it with one medication if we can come up with the right one. Healthy blood cells can replace the atrophied cells. All I need is a continuing source of uninfected royal blood for about a week to generate healthy plasma. But first, we’ve got to keep the members of the royal family who’re still alive from dying. That’s going to be your jo
b. Keep them alive long enough to throw the infection off or for me to synthesize a cure.”
“Treat the symptoms.”
“But treat them in the right order. It might not be the right thing to do to lower a fever. The fever’s something that I think helps. You’re going to be treating the empress herself and over twenty of her family members on the home planet. You’ll be communicating with physicians all over the empire, telling them how to treat the family members they’ve got. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to find a cure for the mutation. I’ve had my network of spies quietly sifting through information on the whole empire and the Federation—even through the Klingon Empire—for weeks now. So far, we haven’t found a single family member who’s not infected.”
“Ripple-effect contamination,” Crusher breathed. “God, that’s a new twist….”
“What’s that mean?” Riker asked.
Spock almost answered, but restrained himself. He was curious to hear Dr. McCoy’s analysis of what was happening to the Romulans, and forced himself to remember that his role on a starship was no longer to provide information and move events along.
“Means we can’t synthesize a cure without an uncontaminated family member. I need clear blood, and I can’t find anybody. Also means this is no accident. Somebody’s doing this on purpose. Somebody planned this plague in such a way as to make sure it can’t be cured. That’s why,” McCoy added, now turning to Picard, “I arranged to have this rendezvous on board the Enterprise.”
“I beg your pardon?” Picard asked.
“Three years ago, Captain, you picked up a Romulan defector. He left the empire in disgrace after leading a coup against the empress. When that failed, he fled to the Federation and you offered sanctuary. Correct?”
“Oh…yes, a minor incident for us. We gave him sanctuary and resisted the extradition police on the planet where we found him. What was his name, Mr. Riker, do you remember?”
“Uh…believe it was Renn something, wasn’t it, sir?”
“Check on the man, would you, please?”
“Aye, sir.” Riker moved to the science station and looked over the android’s shoulder. “Check ship’s log and all ancillary documentations for Stardates 41099.1 through the ensuing six months. It’s in there somewhere.”
“Checking, sir.”
“Then link into the archivist’s computer at Starbase Ten. We’re still in range, aren’t we?”
While they worked, McCoy said, “Disgraced blood’s as good as any. This defector’s the third cousin to the empress on her mother’s side, so it’ll be undiluted blood and give us a strong base for immunological work.”
“That must be what the message means,” Picard said, glancing at Spock. “The admiralty gave me orders to cooperate with you both and transport you to any location in Federation space that you specified. They must mean for us to take you to this Rekk person, once we find where he is.”
Spock nodded. “Rather than risk transporting him from station to station, we hoped to use the starship, for safety and security reasons.”
“We’re at your disposal, of course,” Picard assured.
“If I can’t find any uncontaminated plasma,” McCoy contemplated, “then it’s all over. Ninety-five percent of the infected people are going to die and there’s no way to stop it. You get this thing, you are dead.”
His flat statement had a chilling effect.
“The next trick,” McCoy added, “is getting us in there.”
“What?” Crusher asked. “Why don’t we just go in? They know why we’re coming, right?”
“They’ll give special access to Dr. McCoy and to you,” Riker told her, “but not to the starship. Medical access is a little different from military access.”
“Correct,” Spock said. “If any starship moves through the Neutral Zone and into Romulan space, the imperial leadership will be forced to act against us. Their own people will stand for nothing less. The empress knows Federation medical science may be their only chance, no matter who concocted this attack, but she would be forced to respond against a ship of the line or she could lose power before she loses her life.”
“That’s why we’re not going,” Picard explained. “At least, we are not.” And he looked worriedly at Beverly Crusher.
“Arrangements will be made,” Spock assured her, and felt suddenly remiss in having delayed securing passage. In fact, permission for passage into Romulan space had been secured, but not the method of passage.
“It’s a problem,” Captain Picard said. From the captain’s expression, Spock could tell that the blueblooded commander of this Enterprise thoroughly understood the ramifications of secured space, and when a starship could and could not be of service.
“Yes,” Spock reluctantly admitted. “Even the UFP diplomatic corp cannot breach imperial space. This time, the royal family wants us in, but no one else does. Perhaps…secrecy required concessions I should not have made this time.”
“Sir?” Riker straightened at Data’s side. “We’ve got something here.”
The android touched his controls and read off, “The Romulan defector Rekk Devra Kilrune is no longer living in the Federation.”
“Where is he, then?” Picard asked. “We’ll go get him.”
Data swiveled around in his chair, his expression particularly childlike. “No, sir…he is no longer living in the Federation.”
Riker held out a hand that stopped what seemed to be turning into a debate of unclarity, and looked at his captain. “Rekk Devra was murdered, Captain…fifteen months ago, during a visit to Deep Space Nine.”
A mantle of chill descended upon the bridge, as winter cloaks northern hills. Spock felt it, and saw that all the others also felt it. Shoulders tightened, pensive glances traveled, fists clenched, lips pressed. Strange how a revelation could be so tangible, so very present.
The last living uncontaminated royal family member, dead. Whoever was driving the force of this plague was a critical step ahead.
And now…what?
Chapter Twelve
Combat Support Tender Saskatoon,
Starfleet Registry CST 2601
“DAMAGE CONTROL, TOP DECK!”
“Take some of the new midshipmen up there with you.”
“Right. You and you, and your friend over there, come with me.”
“And this one.”
On the severely angled bridge deck of the Saskatoon, Eric Stiles hooked the nearest midshipman and handed him to Jeremy White as Jeremy rushed past him, dragging the other three kids.
“Did it hit us or just skin us?” Stiles tossed as an afterthought as he brushed hot bits of plastic from his shoulders. “Mr. Perraton, have somebody trim the deck gravitational compensators, please. Rafting hands, man umbilicals one, two, and four.”
“Direct hit, midships upper quadrant, lateral shield, port side.”
“Did you say upper quadrant?”
“Upper. At least I think it’s there—” Jeremy’s words became garbled as he disappeared into the bulky body of the CST, jumping through hatch after hatch until he got to the tubular companionway that would take him to the operational deck above the middle of the ship. Smoke rolled freely from chamber to chamber through the body of the CST, a ship built on lateral lines to avoid transfer of equipment up and down ladder wells. Despite its 200-meter LOA, the tender only had three decks. Factories didn’t need stairways.
“Rats,” Stiles muttered, surveying the shattered trunk housing that had just been blown all over the deck. “Ship to ship.”
To his right, at the comm station, Midshipman Zelasko controlled a cough and squeaked, “Ship to ship, sir.”
Nearly choking on the acrid smoke from fried circuits in the deck and sparks on the smoldering carpet, Stiles held onto the helm stanchion as the CST rolled noticeably under him. “Captain Sattler, I’ve got to be able to get closer than this. If both our ships can’t move off as a unit, you’ve got to kick those fighters off harder when they come into range. I know you?
??ve never done this before, but—”
“Sorry, Commander—Fire!” The captain’s voice from the Destroyer Lafayette crackled back at him through the electrical charges of phaser and disruptor fire in open space. “Sorry again. Two units got past us. I can’t move off with a kinked nacelle, not even on impulse, without knowing what else is damaged up there.”
“The arbitrariness of battle is for you to worry about, Captain, thank the god of problems.”
“He said cheerily,” Travis Perraton edited from the other side of the narrow horseshoe-shaped bridge, where he was dodging from station to station coordinating the next few moves. To somebody on the upper deck, he spoke into a comm unit. “Just control the damage, Adams, don’t repair it yet. We don’t come first out here, remember?”
Spitting dust from his neatly trimmed moustache, Stiles turned forward again and wrapped up his communication with the destroyer. “We’ll have your external diagnostic in a minute, Captain.”
“Are you damaged? You’re venting something off your upper hull.”
“Yes, we’ve got some damage, but we’ll repair it later. Your ship comes first. Keep the comm lines open if possible. You’ll have to drop your shields while we raft up and do the work. That’ll be the tricky part. You’ll want to have one of the other Starfleet ships run a cover grid.”
“I’ll contact the Majestic and—tactical, broad on the bow—fire! Deflectors, shift double starboard! Hail the Majestic—fire at will, Samuels! Majestic, Sattler here—”
“She’s got her hands full.” Stiles turned and called back into the scoped hatchways, not bothering with the comm. “Tell me when you know something, Jeremy! Those Romulans can see we’re vulnerable, so work faster.”
Jeremy’s disembodied voice trailed back through three sections. “Scanning…nacelle hasn’t been breached…not on the outside, anyway…could be internal feedback from a hit someplace else, though. The main injector’s secure…there’s a crack in the sliding bulkhead. Let me follow it down…I got it, Eric, I see a fractured buckler. It’s not the nacelle. It’s the strut.”