Near the empress’s bed, Iavo rubbed his forefingernail against his other hand’s thumb knuckle and protested with his expression. “The infection was imported on his vessel. We tracked it back to a low-level medication in his cargo bound for—”
“He’s a busy little gossip, not a biological terrorist,” Crusher insisted as Hashley’s big sopsy eyes blinked up at her. “That medicine has been coming in here for more than forty years from a pharmaceutical company sympathetic to Romulans. All Mr. Hashley did was bring it in. Somebody else engineered the tainting of the shipment and then the delivery of the tainted stuff to all the royal family members. Hashley here is just a dupe.”
“Whose dupe?”
Crusher shook her head and let herself rattle on, spilling her thoughts.
“Nobody clever enough to distribute this infection would run a little trade route for ten years. If you knew more about humans—it’s kind of obvious this man’s not biding his time to take over the universe. Romulans might be that tenacious, but humans don’t have the patience. Or a two-hundred-year lifespan. Why do you think we’re always in such a damn hurry? Gotta get things done before we die.”
Pacing uneasily nearby, Sentinel Iavo switched fingernails and leered doubtfully at Ansue Hashley, who sat like a bruised puppy. “Whose dupe was he?”
“We’re not sure,” Crusher admitted. “Dr. McCoy’s right, though. It’s got all the earmarks of a series of cross-racial multiprion plagues. Until recently, nobody put them together. The first clue was just three years ago at Deep Space Nine. Well—then the station was called Terok Nor.”
“I remember that!” Hashley offered. “Cardassians, Bajorans, and Ferengi all got the same sickness! They were all accusing—”
“Oh, I missed a scratch right next to your lip,” Crusher cut off. “Here—let me seal it up. Don’t move, now…. The Cardassians suspected a Bajoran rebel group of manufacturing the disease, and they were partly right. The rebels were happy to make sure the Cardassians caught the disease, until they found out that Bajorans could get it too. And there was no way the Bajorans at that time had the resources or the science infrastructure to develop something as advanced as cross-species viral infection. They can’t even do it now, and back then they were subjugated. Not only the Deep Space Nine infection, but we also found out that two years earlier several human-alien hybrids were infected with an unidentified virus, and that’s unheard-of in nature. This thing’s being systematically mutated, targeted, and delivered.”
Iavo stopped pacing briefly. “I take it those were not all human and the same alien hybrids.”
“No, they were all mixed up. People with that kind of genetics just can’t ‘catch’the same thing naturally. There you go, Mr. Hashley, all patched up. You’ll be sore, but you’ll live. Now, I want you to just stay right here with me and Data and help us do what we have to do.” She straightened, handed Data the sealer to put back in the med-pack, then turned to Iavo. “All right, Sentinel, I’m ready to start treating the empress. Are you ready to help?”
The tall imperial official glanced at the two female servants, then met the gaze of one of the four guards. They seemed to be communicating, but not in the way one would expect of a senior government official and a clutch of underlings from way, way under. Iavo clutched his hands before him, flexed them, stretched his fingers, looked at the furry carpet for a moment then raised his eyes again at the nearest guard.
Such a simple step took a very long time, as choices go. Finally, seeming to make a decision or part of one, Iavo turned his back to the guards as if deeply troubled by their presence. “What do you need from us?”
Crusher watched the guards for a moment. Were they averting their eyes on purpose? “First of all, I want these women out of here. Data and Mr. Hashley can be my assistants. And I’d like you to cool it off by fifteen degrees in here. Clear that incense or whatever’s burning out of the chamber and circulate some fresh air.”
“But this is how we always—”
“If ‘always’ was working, you wouldn’t need me here, would you? Cool, and air, please.”
Iavo paused, seemed to be deciding between being insulted and some other reaction Crusher couldn’t make out.
Once again the Sentinel met the eyes of the guard nearest to him.
“We’ll do as you instruct, Doctor,” he agreed, speaking slowly. Hypnotically he rubbed a single fingernail. “Do you think you can save her?”
Chapter Seventeen
STILES’S HANDS SHOOK as he stood beside the Saskatoon’s command chair. On the other side of the chair, Ambassador Spock placidly standing, the elderly Leonard McCoy sitting in a console chair—both men watched the approach of a forbidden planet in a forbidden sector. Stiles had offered the doctor the command chair, but McCoy had demurred, saying that only the “golden boy” should sit there. Stiles hadn’t been able to sit in their presence, so the chair went empty through the entire voyage. Even when Alan brought tea.
Every regulation in several civilizations prevented their coming here, yet here they flew. The hoops of outposts, stations, guard ships, patrols, and bureaucratic drumbeating they’d had to jump through had left Stiles with a headache that was still here days and days later. The tension of moving into Romulan space to drop off Dr. Crusher and Data had been enough to peel fruit, and now Saskatoon was deep inside Red Sector, trailing deals and bribes and threats and name-dropping that had gotten them all the way here.
For Stiles, though, this was the door of purgatory. He couldn’t keep his hands warm anymore. The self-examination was no fun either. Why was he so nervous? He had these heavy hitters with him, didn’t he?
Why was his stomach twisted up into a spiral? The absence of foolish cockiness should’ve been reassuring and mature, but the fact was he wished he still had it. That zing of thinking he knew everything had protected him from a whole lot of scared. Wishing he could feel his fingers, he wondered if those two men over there had ever preferred to pull their own teeth out than go in someplace they had to go. Duty, cause, purpose, rank, ability—all those things fell short of the driving force he needed to overcome what he felt. There was only one thing drawing him forward, against all the forces pushing him back.
Gripping one hand with the other to hide the trembling, he looked briefly to portside, to Travis and Alan. Alan winked reassuringly, and Travis gave him a thumbs-up. They were willing to go.
Embarrassed, he puckered his shoulders. His friends were reassuring him, supporting him into the unknown. It should be the other way around.
“Hero,” he muttered.
No one heard. He barely heard himself.
Spock glanced at him.
The planet of his dread swelled on the main screen and six of the ancillary monitors.
“Approach, Eric?” Travis prodded from the port side.
“Hm? Oh…sorry. Helm—let’s see…come to point nine, equatorial approach vector, angle four one. No—four two. There’s a constant thermal over that big canyon.”
“May I ask what you’re reading on the planet’s surface?” Ambassador Spock asked. “Anything unfamiliar? Any sign of destruction by the Constrictor?”
“I’m picking up airstrips,” Jeremy reported, “a couple of things that might be missile deployment facilities…heliports…some satellites…pretty typical. Maybe mid-or late-twenty-first-century equivalent or so. I could be all wrong, though.”
At tactical, Zack Bolt commented, “You get to a certain level of atmospheric aeronautics and yours is as good as anybody’s.”
Stiles waved an icy hand toward Spock. “Why don’t you have a look for yourself, sir? You were here too, and I’m sure you knew the layout a lot better than I ever did. After all…”
If Spock’s dark eyes saw through the layers of reasons and excuses, he made no hint of that, except perhaps for the hesitation before accepting.
“Very well,” he said, and took the place at the science station as Jeremy moved out of his way. He bent over the readout
hood, tapped some of the controls, causing monitors to flicker and change, focus or choose new subjects.
Stiles knew what Spock expected—a devastated planet, a civilization crushed nearly out of existence, the people who’d managed to survive suffering in the few remaining caves and wreckage that hadn’t been smashed, hardly any old people, hardly any kids….
But that’s not what came up.
Maps of the planet’s cities, boundaries in some places marked off by electronic border markers readable from space. Stiles recognized some of what he saw from that first approach all those years ago, and he was stirred by new apprehensions. He recognized the mountains showing up on geographical long-range, and flinched. The idea of returning in triumph, healthy, alive, in command of a ship, dissolved and crumbled away. Suddenly he was twenty-one and out of control.
The hum of the ship around him as thrusters moved them toward orbit pounded like blood in his head. He was grateful when Travis quietly took over the approach orders, doing so smoothly enough that nobody seemed to notice. Or at least they pretended they didn’t.
Stiles wasn’t much for putting on airs, but he’d have liked to give them a little command puff-up right about now, just for Christmas. Couldn’t find it, though. Just couldn’t find it.
“Cities seem intact. No signs of catastrophic damage,” Spock commented as he clicked his way through the scanner’s offerings. “I recognize several of the buildings at the main city complexes on the primary continent….” Now he leaned closer and seemed almost to frown. “Although…the architectural style has changed significantly. Many of the old constructions are missing, replaced by complexes with only one or two stories.” He turned his head, without straightening up, to look at Stiles. “During your incarceration, did you hear any word of so broad a cultural change?”
“Me? Zevon and I used to talk about what could be done to help buildings survive the Constrictor…elastic brackets and joints, different construction materials—either much heavier so they could withstand the pressure, or much lighter so they wouldn’t be crushed…but nobody ever paid attention to us. That was just us, just talking.”
“They seem to have implemented many changes,” Spock commented, looked at what he saw on the screens. “Even the colors of the cities are different now. I believe they may have changed materials significantly. They seem to be primarily using quarried granite rather than timber and brick. And I’m reading quintotitantium and dutronium reenforcement members rather than conventional steel and iron. When I evacuated, they were incapable of such a development at their industrial level.”
“Granite…” Stiles sifted his memory. “Dutronium…Zevon and I used to design—we used to think up all kinds of things. Maybe the Pojjana just figured out some of them on their own. It doesn’t take that much to figure out how to build a spandex house, y’know…most of our ideas just made basic sense. It’s not like we had much to work with or anything….”
McCoy watched the continent slowly turn on the large forward screen. “Do you think he’s still alive and influencing their development?”
“I hope so, I sure hope so,” Stiles said with his heart squeezing fearfully. “Zevon doesn’t have a prime directive. But I don’t know how he could get anybody to listen to him. We could never get past the assistant warden. And I don’t know if…they turned on him after I got pulled out or…maybe they just…”
No one said anything to comfort or refute his tortured suppositions or stem the racing of his imagination.
“There’s only so much he could do,” Stiles grumbled, his thoughts taking on a life of their own. “After all, the sector’s been red for years. Nobody’s been in or out, right?”
“We watch the sector constantly,” Spock undergirded. “There has been extremely little breaching, give or take the odd delinquent shaman.”
Dr. McCoy’s white brows danced. “Or the occasional sublime wise-ass. Other than that, a skinny bird couldn’t slip in and out of Red Sector without somebody’s noticing. Mr. Stiles, you think your friend could be somewhere other than the capital city? Running some process that engineers those new buildings?”
“Even Zevon couldn’t make industries all by himself, even if he were in charge of the whole planet, never mind a prisoner. Besides, he wasn’t an architect. Is eleven years long enough to make sweeping changes on a whole planet? Nah…probably not. He’d have to get all the way up to somebody trusting him first, and, believe me, on a planet of people who really don’t like aliens, that could take…well, more doing than either of us could manage from a prison cell or our lab. Travis, adjust the trim, will you?”
“Trim, aye. Give it another three degrees level, Stinson.”
“Aye aye, sir, three degrees starboard.”
“We must not assume,” Spock mentioned, “that anything is the same after eleven years.”
Stiles strode around to the other side of the bridge, where Spock was still scanning the readouts of the planet below. “Are you saying you think he’s dead?”
Spock glanced at him. “You spare yourself by accepting the likelihood. You nearly died yourself.”
“I was sick.”
“And ill-treated, poorly fed, ignored, imprisoned—”
“Zevon’s Romulan. He’s stronger than—”
“Not stronger enough,” the ambassador cautioned, now standing straight and looking right at him. “The odds…are troubling.”
McCoy was watching him. Stiles could sense it.
He could sense—and see—the fretful averted attention of everybody around him. They all knew his past. He was too close to this. Maybe it was a mistake not sending somebody completely impassive. There was more at stake than just Zevon. Was he thinking clearly enough?
“What do we do?” Stiles wondered. “Just…approach?”
“Almost to the atmosphere, Eric,” Travis reported. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“We’ve got to have an order either to enter or veer off. At this point we can’t hover.”
“No doubt the planetary monitoring system has already noticed us,” Spock told him. “Although they had no spaceborne fleet, they were perfectly able to effect short-range scans of the immediate area, for defensive purpose. I’m sure they have identified your ship as a Starfleet unit. If you don’t mind my suggesting we broadcast a—”
A shriek cut him off as the CST bellowed around them and the whole ship was jaw-kicked. The deck canted to an instant 30-degree list, as if they’d struck something out in the middle of space. Were they too low? Had they hit a mountain?
Pinned to the side of the helm for a terrible few seconds, Stiles gritted his teeth and fought against the thrust. He heard the cries of his crew as they were thrown violently against the side of the tender, crammed into bulkheads and equipment and each other in a tangle of pressure and shock.
“What is it!” he called. “Did we hit a satellite?”
Jeremy clung to the console one chair down from where Spock was pressed to the science ledge. “Energy funnel! It’s pulling us down!”
Dr. McCoy clasped his chair and grimaced. “I hate this kind of thing—”
“Is it coming from the planet?” Twisting, Stiles jabbed at the helm over the shoulder of the flabbergasted trainee pilot. “Oh, no, I know they shouldn’t have this! They didn’t have anything like this! Not that could pull in a CST! We can tow a starship!”
Travis scrambled for the engineering mainframe to see if there was an answer there, but when he turned again his face was a mask of bafflement.
“It’s as if the planet itself has grabbed us!”
The Imperial Palace
Cool air, finally, moved through the ancient halls of the crown family’s traditional home. The soft harp music played eternally over the sound system, just sweet enough to drive anybody crazy after the first twenty hours. The tape had looped a few times, and by now Ansue Hashley had taken to humming harmony to the tunes he recognized.
This, in
bitter contrast to the suffering empress, who was roused now and then by Crusher’s ministrations and wakened to relentless agony because from time to time medical tests required her cooperation. Even when the young woman was allowed to sink back into unconsciousness, her struggle just to breathe provided a pathetic percussion to the damned harp music. It had been a difficult two days.
“Mr. Hashley, please take these two instruments and clean them thoroughly, the way I showed you yesterday, and then bring them back,” Crusher instructed. She’d only caught a few catnaps and was feeling the stress of fatigue. This was like being a resident again.
“I just love helping you,” Hashley said. “Maybe when we get out of this, I can join Starfleet and come to the Enterprise and be your assistant.”
“You could certainly do something like that,” she said. “No reason you couldn’t take a few paramedical courses and start a new career. I’m thinking of switching to professional wrestler, myself. Whew…could you bring me that pillow and put it behind my back? I can’t let go of this IV pump right now. I’ve almost got a result…stand by, Data.”
In her periphery, Crusher saw Data look up from his communications center, formerly the empress’s dressing-room vanity. “Standing by, Doctor.”
The imperial communications relays were tied in to over six hundred stations throughout the empire. Data had taken nearly three hours to confirm, through codes, geological information, and star-mapping devices, that the relays were actually working and in contact with a spiderweb of stations on several planets. After all, what good would it be if they were just talking to a con artist next door?