Chapter 16

The three doctors scanned the report Uhura had sent them (“A New Cure for an Ancient Illness? The ‘Magic’ of Hilopon”) at their own individual reading speeds. Uhura waited as they read, watching their faces for reactions. McCoy was the last to finish, but the first to speak.

“Well, well, what a coincidence!” he said dryly.

“So you think it’s genuine?” Uhura said.

“Could be,” the old grouch hedged. “Where’d it come from?”

“You’re not the only one who’s been fishing,” Uhura told him. “Intercepted by one of my Listeners from a submission to the Journal of Xenohistology and Interplanetary Epidemiology.”

“Okay,” McCoy said. “I’m suitably impressed.”

“Apparently the journal wasn’t,” Uhura reported. “They’ve flagged it for rejection pending verification from outside sources. Which gives us an in. But that’s your molecule, all right.”

“Confirmed,” Selar said.

“I agree,” Crusher chimed in.

McCoy was still ruminating. “It’s still got the Thamnos cartel written all over it,” he said. “That old pirate knows damn well where his son is!” he blustered. “There oughta be some way we can turn the screws on him.”

“Probably not necessary,” Uhura said coolly. “We have ways of monitoring him. If he tries to get in touch with his son or sends anybody looking for him, we’ll track it. You rattled his cage; that’s sufficient.”

“I’d like to rattle more than that!” McCoy steamed. “What about the author of this article? Who or what is a Cinchona, and where’s it located?”

“A logical assumption would be, at the source of the hilopon,” Selar suggested.

 

Koval’s inner sanctum was virtually soundproof, not only because it was thick-walled and deep underground, but because those walls contained the most sophisticated baffling and jamming equipment known to Romulans. A good thing, too. At the moment, Koval’s voice was shrill enough to shatter glass.

“…because by publishing your findings this soon, you idiot, you’ve risked antagonizing an entire planet full of xenophobic Renagans who are apt to kill you for it, that’s why!” he was shouting.

“But I didn’t tell anyone where to find it!” Thamnos protested. “When the Journal publishes my article, they’ll have to come to me.”

“Hilopon has been touted as a folk cure in that region for generations. You might have at least had the imagination to call it by another name!” Koval’s voice dipped down into a lower, ominous register. “Oh, they’ll find you, all right, and in so doing they’ll save me the trouble of killing you. Aside from that, your research is full of holes because you’ve once again paid someone else to write it for you!”

“That’s not true!” Thamnos protested. “I put this report together myself.”

“Only because no one on Renaga can read!” Koval ground his teeth. If he’d owned a sense of irony, he’d have burst out laughing at this juncture, if only from futility. “How dare you publish without my permission? What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t expect so many people to die. You never told me so many people were going to die.”

“So one death or a hundred is acceptable, but not thousands or tens of thousands, is that it?”

Thamnos was silent. At least, Koval thought, his anger spent, his mind already ticking over with alternatives, the transmitter was audio only, so he was spared the sight of that nauseating pink face!

“You were supposed to await my instructions,” Koval said tightly. “We’re still trying to determine why hilopon only works on Renaga. By defying my orders and publishing now, you may well have destroyed any future with us.”

“My father won’t let you hurt me!” he heard Thamnos say, and if he could have reached through the transmitter and wrapped his fingers around the man’s throat, he would have done so. “What if you never find a way to make the hilopon work off Renaga?”

Then I persuade the Continuing Committee to send a warbird to Renaga to lay claim to the hilopon , and I personally kill you! Koval thought, shaking with anger. He listened to Thamnos mouth-breathing, the only sound from Renaga at the moment.

“What do I do now?” Thamnos asked at last when he realized Koval was not going to answer his question.

“You do nothing. Absolutely nothing, until I tell you otherwise. Can you manage that?”

Koval didn’t wait for an answer.

“Idiot!” he added once more for emphasis before terminating the transmission.

 

Albatross was en route to Renaga. McCoy had gone off-line to take a nap. The holos were no longer broadcasting to the ship, but Dr. Crusher had something on her mind, and she was talking to Uhura on discrete from her office across the quadrangle.

“Admiral? Mind if I ask you what the hell we’re doing?”

Crusher’s office faced east, but Uhura had a view to the west. The sun had just set behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and the clouds were entertaining themselves with shades of slate blue edged in fuchsia and salmon pink before a turquoise and cobalt twilight won out over all. Uhura was visited with a sudden memory of a moment in time when the bridge had been awash with flood waters, a Klingon bird-of-prey foundered bobbing in the ocean beneath it, and Earth thought it would never see the sun again. So long ago, and yet it seemed like yesterday.

And I’m still at my post trying to save the universe, she thought. Just this one more mission, and-

“Go ahead, Doctor.”

“We’ve got more than enough evidence now to hang this on the Romulans.”

“No argument there,” Uhura acknowledged. On her desktop, reports on a half-dozen new crises were streaming in from Listeners flung across two quadrants and she watched them slot into different categories of crisis awaiting SI’s attention. “Now why don’t you say what’s really on your mind?”

“Lives are being lost, and we seem to be wandering around in circles. How much longer do we continue sending the away team from one planet to another to another before we bring the evidence we have to Command and to the Federation Council and whoever else we need to and-“

“And accomplish what exactly? Alerting the Romulan Empire as a whole to what we know won’t cure this disease, Doctor.”

“We can just ask them if they’re experiencing anything similar inside the Empire. Suggest we work together on a cure. Let them take all the credit if they offer one. Because if they created this, they must have a cure.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because it would be suicide to do otherwise. The odds on something this deadly spreading throughout the entire Empire-I can’t believe they’d do that.”

Uhura sighed. Every generation had to be taught anew. “Then you don’t know Romulans. Granted, there have been no official contacts since Tomed, but go through your archives and see how many instances we know of where Romulan medical personnel have used experimental drugs on subject populations…”

“That’s different,” Crusher argued. “A drug can be targeted and controlled. A contagion without a cure can’t.” She shuddered, stuck her hands in the pockets of her smock. “Every time I have to work with this thing, no matter what precautions we take, I keep thinking of what could happen if it got out of the lab somehow, if I accidentally brought it home, if a ship whose crew is infected pulled into Spacedock and somehow brought it to Earth. I want a universe in which my son will be safe!”

“Don’t you think I want that as well?” Uhura demanded. “But we ask the Romulans if they know anything about it, and then what? They deny any knowledge of it until they can produce enough evidence to say we created it. How will that make the universe safer? Answer me that. You’re young; I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a combat situation, but-“

“I lost my husband to one.”

That shocked Uhura into silence. She’d forgotten the circumstances of Jack Crusher’s death. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she spoke again.

“I’d forgotten that. And I am sorry. But let me try to explain something to you.” She deactivated the incoming messages screen-it would be waiting for her the next time she accessed it-folded her hands, leaned forward, and gave Crusher her complete attention. “The reason I am still at this desk instead of off on my own private island somewhere where there are no comm screens, is because I want to do as much as I can to stop the screaming.”

“The screaming? I’m sorry, Admiral, I-“

“I won’t presume to burden you with my experiences, with the number of times in the course of my career that I sat at that communications console listening to the screaming. Because that’s what a comm officer always has to contend with, is the screaming. You have to keep the channels open, keep listening in case the enemy wants to surrender, but mostly what you hear and keep on hearing is the screaming. Until the moment comes when you don’t hear it anymore, you merely watch the debris field scatter across your forward screen. And then you listen to the silence, but it still sounds like screaming.”

She paused for breath, more exercised than Crusher had ever seen her.

“I would like, very much,” she said slowly, “to live the rest of my life without ever again having to listen to the screaming.

“Now, then,” she said, changing gears suddenly, all business again. “This is what we’re going to do. The away team is on its way to Renaga to collect samples of this hilopon and see if it works. If it does, Q.E.D., we bring in the diplomats and the away team comes home. If it doesn’t, I recall the away team anyway, and I get word to Cretak about what we’ve found so far. Then she and I decide what happens next.”

“You’d send Zetha back to her?” Crusher asked for want of anything better to say. “And what about this Thamnos character?”

“Let’s wait and see what the away team finds,” was all Uhura would say.

“And Catalyst?”

“Catalyst!” Uhura repeated bitterly. Why had Command dreamed up such a beautiful name for such a deadly thing? “We keep on looking for a cure. I don’t have a better answer than that, do you?”

 

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” Sisko muttered as he and Tuvok scanned through several hundred meters of rock to find Cinchona’s laboratory deep inside the mountain and read one solitary life-form within.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s too easy,” Sisko said, suppressing the cough that still plagued him despite Selar’s having given him a complete physical and finding no physiological cause. “Nothing else about this mission has been spelled out in big block letters for us. Something in my bones tells me we’re being set up, and I don’t like it.”

They had scanned Renaga from space, registering a predominantly agrarian society on a temperate but thin-soiled Class-M planet. There seemed to be no large cities, only narrow-laned villages clustered atop steep-sloped mountains, most of them walled and fortified.

“It appears to be a preindustrial society,” Tuvok observed. “I note the equivalent of oxcarts, and some faster indigenous steeds vaguely resembling horses. Unpaved roads, no motorized vehicles or machinery of any kind. Agriculture is conducted by manual labor or with the use of draft animals.”

“Wonder why most of the settlements are clumped on top of the hills like that?” Sisko wondered. “Even if they use most of the land for agriculture, you’d think they’d build a farmhouse in the fields now and then. Floods, maybe?”

“Perhaps they were originally fortresses,” Tuvok suggested. “Possibly suggesting a long history of fighting among local warlords.”

“Of course!” Sisko said. “You think there’s any centralized government at all?”

“Not our concern,” Tuvok said, homing in on a particular sector where something had caught his interest. “We are here to gather hilopon and, if possible, find the individual who submitted the paper to the Journal. The less attention we attract, the better.”

“Agreed. But I meant to ask you about that. How can we be so sure he’s here, if-” Sisko began, but then he noticed what Tuvok had picked up on his scanner. “That can’t be right. You said this was a preindustrial society.”

“I did,” Tuvok acknowledged.

“Then what are they doing with a subspace transmitter? And am I imagining things, or is that a Romulan signature?”

“You are not imagining things,” Tuvok assured him.

 

A scan of the entire planet in fact revealed three Romulan transmitters, two of which were being intermittently used by a handful of Romulans to send strings of code, probably to a warbird lurking somewhere on the fringes of the Zone. Tuvok would send samples back to Starfleet Command for decoding. The third transmitter, sending from a cave beneath one of the hilltop cities, might have been a Romulan transmitter, but it was not being used by a Romulan.

“The difference is subtle,” Tuvok reported. “But unless I am mistaken, this individual is a Rigelian.”

That was when Sisko began wondering why it was all suddenly so easy. The sight of Cinchona’s life-form reading, alone within his unguarded mountain fastness, was making him twitchy. Not for the first time, he suppressed the urge to cough.

“You’d think someone sitting on what could be one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century would at least have a security system in place,” he suggested.

 

Traditionally, the Romulan military loathed the Tal Shiar, and the feeling was mutual. Officers of the Imperial fleet were, at least by training, straightforward and direct; they preferred action to talk, the shortest distance between two points. Military strategy had purpose, they argued; the Tal Shiar’s sneakery, they maintained, was more often than not spying for spying’s sake.

The Tal Shiar in general, and Koval in particular, considered the military to be weapons-happy dunderheads, the product of too much upper-caste inbreeding, incapable of original thought.

Nevertheless, when he needed to commandeer a warbird, even to enter the Outmarches, Koval had sufficient clout to hold his nose and do so.

“Cloak engaged,” Admiral Tal announced. He gave Koval a look that would have frightened most men. It bounced off Koval’s mental shields like a badly aimed phaser blast. “I wish I knew where in the hells we’re going and why.”

“The where I can answer,” Koval said indolently. “The why is none of your business.”

 

It was no easy feat to land a space vessel unnoticed near a populated area on a planet where the sound of an engine had never been heard before. It would be one thing if they were an anthropology team simply studying the inhabitants; they might have set Albatross down anywhere in the hinter-lands and hitchhiked into town in the back of an oxcart. But in this instance they needed speed as much as stealth. The ship had to be close to their objective.

“I’d be happier if this were a shuttlecraft with a starship for backup,” Sisko muttered, searching the terrain near where they’d picked up the Rigelian’s signal for a safe place to conceal the ship. He was reluctant to leave her in orbit at station-keeping and beam down, but this time thought he’d ask Tuvok for his input before he made his decision.

“I figure there’s too much likelihood that we’d be noticed beaming out. More to the point, I don’t like leaving her alone up there in case someone should get curious.”

“Agreed,” Tuvok had said. “However, landing the ship will necessitate our splitting up into shifts again.”

“Logically, Lieutenant Sisko,” Selar suggested, “as the two best trained for alien terrain conditions, you and Lieutenant Tuvok are the optimal choice for first reconnaissance. Further, I am in the middle of an experiment which requires my complete attention. Zetha can remain with me.”

It was what Sisko had had in mind. Now all he said was: “You’ll keep her sealed up until we signal you.”

“Of course,” Selar said, turning her attention back to her scanners.

Albatross waited until sundown before gliding into atmosphere on thrusters and, in a daring maneuver he’d never tried anywhere but in simulations before, Sisko cut the engines entirely for the last hundred meters and let her momentum carry her until he swore he could count the blades of saw grass skimming by beneath her belly. Just when it looked as if he could reach out and grab a handful of that grass, he activated the reverse thrusters in a series of short bursts which, if all went well, would neither scorch the grass nor awaken the neighbor’s dog, and Albatross, once more true to her name, bumped awkwardly but unhurt to ground. Only the sheen of sweat on Sisko’s brow revealed just how uncertain he had been that she would.

Selar and Zetha were holding things down back in the lab, oblivious to how dangerous the maneuver had been. Tuvok, still hoping to pick up more signals from the two Romulan transmitters, was also monitoring the Rigelian’s underground lair, and had barely noticed the descent.

“The cave is deserted at present,” he announced once he and Sisko had left the ship, scanning once more with his tricorder as they prepared to go exploring. “Doubtless its owner has returned to hearth and home.”

“Let’s hope it’s for the rest of the night. Don’t suppose a longbow is any use inside a cave?” Sisko mused, absently groping at his hip where a phaser ought to be. “Oh, well. There are two of us. How strong can one Rigelian be?”

 

The cave was indeed deserted, but if the two Starfleet officers expected to find a laboratory, however primitive, they were disappointed. What they found was a dirt-walled cavern only partially excavated from a natural formation, dimly lit by a few overhead lamps. Several rustic tables against the walls of this crudely formed room were cluttered with jars of various sizes and colors, obviously made by local craftsmen, as well as the transmitter which had led them here, which was indeed of Romulan design. There was also a computer terminal which seemed to have been cobbled together from modules salvaged from a vessel augmented with Romulan components.

“Hybridized Rigelian computer,” Sisko announced, just looking at it. “That particular style of interface is something they use.”

There was a refrigeration unit, also of Rigelian manufacture. Instead of specimens or test samples, the refrigerator was cluttered with containers of half-eaten food, much of it spoiled.

“Likely solar powered,” Sisko said, indicating the generator. “Might be able to find the collectors out there in the daytime.”

While he searched the fridge for anything resembling research samples and ending up with nothing more than moldy stew, Tuvok attempted to gain entry to the computer, something which proved not at all difficult. There were some rags and what looked like parts scavenged from a ship piled against one wall, covered in dust and cobwebs, and Sisko began picking through these as well.

“Clothing’s synthetic,” Sisko reported. “Modern stuff, not something you’d find woven on a handloom in a preindustrial society. Food looks local, though.” He heard the Vulcan’s indrawn breath at something on the computer screen. “What is it?”

“Pornography,” Tuvok said, repressing his distaste. “There seems to be nothing on the computer but that. I find no records, no experimental data-“

“Nothing but dirty pictures, huh? Maybe he’s got the data stored somewhere more portable. This is a hideout,” Sisko decided. “The kind of place a man goes to when the wife and kids get on his nerves.”

“Indeed. Perhaps Cinchona’s laboratory is elsewhere.”

“I’d be surprised if he had a laboratory at all.” Sisko picked up a few of the jars, opening the lids and alternately peering inside or sniffing at them. “Hilopon? It looks like dirt.”

Tuvok ran the tricorder over the jars. “Hilopon. As Selar suggested, a natural compound found in the soil of Renaga, just as the original Gnawing bacillus was found in the soil of Romulus.”

So saying, he ran the tricorder over the walls and the dirt floor of the cave and came up with the same readings. “The substances in the jars may have been refined to remove gravel and other debris, but it is essentially no different than the soil beneath our feet. Curious.”

“Or just plain dumb.” On a hunch, Sisko rubbed the contents of one of the jars on a small cut on one finger he’d acquired while chopping the last of the Vidalia onions he’d purchased on Tenjin. The cut healed instantaneously. “Cinchona was right about one thing. It does work for small stuff, at least on its own planet.”

“Cinchona was right about more than that,” a voice said behind them.

 

Selar motioned Zetha to join her in peering at the specimen under the microscope. The girl’s eyes widened in astonishment.

“Is it the hilopon?” she wondered.

“Negative,” Selar replied. “After our departure from Quirinus, I derived a serum from the blood of the Romulan who was killed because the Quirinians believed he had brought the disease.”

“The one who had no…germs,” she pronounced the word carefully. “…in his body at all.”

“Correct. I treated several of the Catalyst mutations with the serum. These are the results.”

Zetha examined them again, just to make sure she understood. Before she could speak, Tuvok’s voice on the intercom interrupted.

“Dr. Selar? Can you beam into the cave at once? Your expertise is required.”

 

Selar brought Zetha with her. It seemed the logical thing to do. Besides-

“Please don’t leave me here by myself,” Zetha pleaded. “If anything goes wrong, I won’t know what to do.”

“Dubious,” Selar said. “You have managed quite well so far. However, for Lieutenant Sisko’s peace of mind as well as your own safety, it might be best if you did accompany me.”

 

“Did my father send you?” was the first thing Thamnos asked his two unexpected visitors. Then something seemed to tell him that was not the appropriate question, so he asked another. “How did you find me?”

“Is that of consequence, Dr. Cinchona?” Tuvok asked, suppressing any sign that he knew who Thamnos was; Sisko had suggested he do most of the talking when they first confronted their suspect. “I am Tuvok. This is Dr. Jacobs. We have read your paper on hilopon. We wish to learn more.”

First captain, now doctor! Sisko thought, trying to hold a deadpan in the face of his most recent promotion.

Thamnos’s beady little eyes lit up momentarily. “Are you from the Journal?” he asked hopefully. Suddenly the dread that had set in after his last conversation with Koval seemed lifted from his shoulders. If someone from the Federation side was willing to foster him, maybe he was safe after all.

Tuvok did not exactly answer the question. “There is another physician in our party who would be better able to address your research. May I summon her?”

Not many men can affect a swagger standing still. Thamnos somehow managed it. “Sure. Be happy to talk to her. Tell her to beam on in.”

Selar’s arrival alone might not have set him off. But something about Zetha’s presence made him suspicious.

“You’re a Romulan,” he said.

Before Zetha could answer, or even decide what to answer, Thamnos began to laugh.

“Okay, I get it! You’re not from the Journal. You’re not from the Federation side at all. I thought he’d come himself, but this is even better. He wants me to test it on you, to back up my article to the Journal. Of course, it all makes sense now…”

His voice and manner grew suddenly manic as he pushed past Sisko and went rummaging amid the debris in the corner until he had scattered all of it to reveal a case of datachips, which he set beside the jury-rigged computer, shoving the jars of hilopon aside.

“Oh, he’s clever! He doesn’t come himself, he sends one of the seeds…” Thamnos was muttering near-hysterically, fumbling through the chips in search of a particular one. “Let’s see, which seeding was it? This one? No. Perhaps this one…let’s see…yes, I think this is it.”

Silently Sisko gave Tuvok an inquiring look. Recommendation? the look said. Do we let him run amok or do we corral him now before he tries to destroy evidence? Tuvok shook his head imperceptibly: I recommend we ascertain what it is he is searching for first.

Thamnos inserted a datachip into the interface. “Computer, correlate retina scan of subjects present with extant files.”

The computer answered him with a code, and Thamnos turned to Zetha smugly. “I knew it! Sample 173. The photo on file makes it look like you have freckles, though. Or is that part of your cover?”

Perplexed, Zetha looked from Selar to Tuvok to Sisko, then back to Selar. “What is he talking about?” she demanded.

“I believe,” Selar said, “he has just provided us with the source of the disease vector.”

 

Cretak had read Koval’s character correctly. Knowing Tuvan’s Syndrome ran in his family, he had been obsessed with illness-and immunity to illness-all his life. When it first occurred to him what a marvelously versatile illness the Gnawing could be, he recalled what most people had forgotten-that some rare few Romulans were immune to the disease. Once his scientists were able to tell him why-possession of a particular rare gene sequence, extant in less than one tenth of one percent of the population-the rest seemed self-evident.

At first he thought he would simply gather together as many of those with the immunity sequence as possible, secretly infect them with the Gnawing, then scatter them like seeds throughout first the worlds on his side of the Zone, then on certain worlds on the Federation side where vulcanoids were common. He would choose as his “volunteers” Romulans who traveled frequently, many of them his own operatives.

The first stage would have the effect of spreading panic and compelling both his Empire and the other side to accuse each other of biological warfare, always a good ploy for keeping the balance of power unbalanced. Anything that sent the Federation side into a frenzy, as long as it was done subtly, was something Koval’s superiors welcomed. Many in the Tal Shiar, as well as the military and the Senate, hungered for an end to the Empire’s half-century of self-imposed isolation, and a return to expansionism. If Koval’s scheme worked on this level, he could present the expansionists with a game plan for conquering worlds and eliminating their indigenous populations without deploying a single warbird or firing a single shot.

So, how to disguise the Gnawing, and render it dormant until its purveyors could be spread across two quadrants? That was the easy part. When carried by the immunes, it could incubate for weeks, sometimes months, before spreading. Koval’s physicians did not know why the incubation period varied from one immune to another, but it wasn’t that important to them. The difficult part was not making the vector so obvious that it attracted attention too soon.

Then there was the awkwardness of having important Romulans suspected of being carriers. It was at this juncture that Koval began not only training the ghilik who were already members of his expendable cadre, but searching the Imperial Census files for those who lived in the back streets and whose disappearance would go largely unremarked. The day he cornered Zetha and Tahir in the alley near the cemetery had been only one of many.

Tahir was not an immune, and so of no use to him. But Zetha, once she had been injected with a series of “nutritional supplements” which, had Selar been there to examine them, she would have recognized at once as Catalyst, became Sample 173. The rest was only a matter of time.

 

Sisko cleared his throat. The annoying dry cough, which had not bothered him while he and Tuvok had at first been poking around among Thamnos’s belongings, had returned. “What are you saying?”

“Oh, come on, don’t play innocent with me!” Thamnos had deactivated the computer, closed the case full of datachips. “He’s more clever than I thought he was. I never realized he had humans and Vulcans in his employ, but then why wouldn’t he? He has the resources. But as soon as I saw her, I knew. All right, you’re branching out on your own, trying to get to the vaccine before he does. I know how that works. Fine, no problem. Only take me with you. He’s as much as threatened to kill me. You have a ship? I want out of here, and fast. I give you the vaccine, you take me with you. Deal?”

“You have perfected an actual vaccine?” Selar asked. “Derived from hilopon, as described in your paper to the Journal?”

Beside her, Zetha had covered her mouth with her hand and was backing away from all of them.

“Sure!” Thamnos said brightly. “Not here. Of course I wouldn’t keep it here. I knew this would be the first place he-or you-would look for it. It’s in a safe place. But I need to go alone. If any of the villagers spotted any one of you, even a human…they’re suspicious enough of strangers, but your clothes…”

“Your vaccine,” Selar said. “Will it work offworld?”

Thamnos’s eyes shifted from side to side.

“I don’t think you’re going anywhere,” Sisko said softly.

He nodded to Tuvok, who moved, catlike, encircling Thamnos’s neck with one long arm, the fingers of his other hand set at the precise point on his shoulder where the briefest pinch would take him down. Thamnos, recognizing the maneuver, did not fight.

“You knock me out, you don’t get the vaccine,” he said. “And you really don’t want to waste any time, you know. You’re all going to need the vaccine very soon. If it isn’t already too late.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Sisko demanded, moving toward him ominously. He wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got there, but he made the move anyway.

“How long have you had that cough?” Thamnos demanded. He jerked his chin toward Zetha. “She’s the carrier, don’t you see? She’s immune, but she’s been incubating the disease for months. Once it’s triggered, you’ll all get it. That cough tells me you already have!”

 

It wasn’t a collapse, exactly, Uhura insisted. She’d gotten up from her desk while she was talking to Crusher, and simply misjudged her footing. The fact that she was walking across a level floor that suddenly seemed to undulate and buckle beneath her was beside the point. She was fine, really.

“The hell you are,” Crusher said, pressing the hypo against the side of her neck. Seeing the older woman literally fall off her feet, Crusher had used a priority override and beamed directly into Uhura’s office, then ordered a backup team to escort the admiral home. “You’re this close to exhaustion. You’re to stay in bed and away from that desk for at least eight hours if I have to strap you down in order to enforce it.”

Annoyed at all the fuss, Uhura was sitting very straight with her arms folded, wearing The Look, by the time Crusher had sent the backup team on its way and returned to the bedroom. But The Look, she discovered, only worked on the male of the species. Damn! she thought. Either I’m losing my touch, or it’s whatever tranquilizer Crusher’s shot me with, but this evening is not going the way I’d planned!

“Doctor’s orders?” she managed, resting on her dignity amid the pillows of her queen-size bed.

“Bed rest. Watch a movie, listen to some music, read a good book,” Crusher said. “Anything but work.”

“May I answer some mail?” Uhura asked sweetly. If The Look didn’t work, maybe her best smile would.

“Only if it’s not work-related,” Crusher scolded, halfway out the door. “Want a cup of hot milk before I go?”

“Get the hell out of here!” Uhura snapped. If the smile wasn’t going to work, either, she’d save it for another occasion. “Go home to your son; I don’t need you here.”

“Good night to you, too,” Crusher said, and was gone.

As soon as the outer door slid shut and locked behind her, Uhura activated the beside console. Riffling through the usual office memos and notes from friends and family members she didn’t have the energy to answer, she found a message from Curzon. She unscrambled it.

“Called in on emergency diplomatic mission, effective immediately. Hush-hush, rush-rush, top secret. So I won’t tell you I’m aboard Okinawa. Will comm you when I get back. Thanks for the memories, Curzon.”

Ordinarily, if Curzon was off on a top secret mission, he kept it secret. By its very presence, his message bothered her. Following her refit, Okinawa had been scheduled to go on maneuvers in the Mutara sector awaiting a new assignment. Where had she been diverted on such short notice, and why would Curzon specifically want Uhura to know?

Memo to self, she thought sleepily as she turned off the bedside lamp and the combination of the sound of foghorns on the bay and whatever it was Crusher had given her took effect: Ascertain Okinawa’s official destination, then extrapolate. Tranquilizers or no, a familiar tingling at the back of her neck said it had something to do with Catalyst.