by Andrew Beery
As she spoke she removed her protective suit. I raised an eyebrow. As far as I could tell she had made no effort to decontaminate the suit.
“Gilboa, terminate isolation fields on beds six through sixteen,” Lori said before turning back to face me.
"As far as I can tell, the mutagenic virus used on the Saulites has spread to every corner of the ship. Our efforts to decontaminate people traveling to and from the Saulite station were ineffective."
“How bad is it? I thought we had been pretty thorough in our decontamination efforts.”
My wife smiled wanly.
"I thought so too, but apparently the virus found a way to best our efforts. As far as how bad it is… I'm not sure at this point. We seem to be getting sicker faster than what the Saulite records indicated for their people, but that may simply be our immune systems kicking into high gear faster than theirs."
“That would be a good thing, yes? I could mean our bodies could mount an effective defense before the virus gets a good hold.”
Lori shook her head.
"I'm afraid in this case it's more likely our bodies will burn themselves out trying to eradicate the infection. I'm treating the worst cases right now by trying to suppress their immune response. If I don't, they'll be dead from multiple organ failures long before their immune system can deal with the virus."
“What are the options? Stasis?” I asked. I pretty much knew the answer, but I needed to hear the words.
I saw wetness in my wife’s eye and knew that the words would be too painful. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her and held her close. Her little body trembled as she sobbed into my shoulder. It was bad… it was really bad.
***
Within eight hours half the human contingent of the crew was showing signs of the Defiler bio-weapon. The J’ni were taking over a larger and larger role in keeping the ship operational. Even the Archon and Rohar ambassadors were stepping in.
Lori had deduced that the virus was specifically targeting Human/Saulite DNA. This raised a concern that the Archon’s might be vulnerable. Fortunately, for our Archon friends, their extra base pair made them immune to this particular virus. This must have been why the Defilers had engineered a different version when they attacked the Archon homeworld of Lo Debar.
My wife, Whiskers, Sa'Mi, Ambassadors Jowls of the Rohar and Shella of the Archons sat in my Ready room. We had been discussing options and contingency plans. For the moment, the J'ni were fabricating stasis pods as fast as they could. We already had twenty crew members in them. The best-case scenario had fully a third of my crew dead before enough pods could be built and brought online. Sadly, the thousand-plus pods available on the Saulite Weapons platform that had been used by the J'ni were simply too small for humans to use.
The way I was feeling, it wouldn’t be long before I would need a stasis pod myself. As one of the first exposed, I was one of the sickest. Lori had wanted to place me in stasis an hour ago, but I refused. I needed to hold on as long as I could.
“What information do we have on the Saulite research into the bio-weapon?” I asked. I had a suspicion that I had asked the question before… my mind was getting fuzzy.
I saw Lori look at Shella with concern in her eyes and I knew my suspicion was correct. I shook my head to try and clear it.
“Look, I know I’ve asked this before, but remind me what was said… I’m not operating with all my oars in the water here.”
Lori, who was only now beginning to sniffle, repeated what she had said a few minutes earlier.
“The Saulites were more omni-skilled than most members of the Galactic Order who, as you know, tend to be highly specialized by race. This may have been an adaptation because, as warriors, they needed to have field engineers and medics.
Unfortunately, that means their doctors, while skilled at battlefield medicine… things like regenerative medicine etc.… are not as adept at dealing with pathogens outside of their normal experience.”
I nodded. This much I remembered. It seemed to me that there was more… something that had sparked an idea in my mind… something that I was struggling to remember.
“There was something else… you said before… something else,” I added between painful coughs.
Lori leaned forward. The look on her face told me I didn’t have long before she hog-tied me and dragged me into a stasis pod.
"The Saulite doctor, a woman, named Q'Tar, felt she was on the cusp of finding a solution but she was too sick to finish her work. If we revived her, she would die before she could even tell us what she was attempting."
That was it! I thought with a sudden burst of clarity.
"Don't revive her. Clone her. Use the Da'Tellen device," I whispered. My strength was fading fast. I was drenched in sweat, and yet I couldn't stop shivering.
Lori shook her head sadly.
“It wouldn’t work. The clone would just get sick and die as well.”
“Time…,” I muttered. “She would have time to...” Before I could finish, I started coughing and couldn’t stop. It felt like somebody had dumped hot coals on my chest… the burning was so bad. Thankfully, after a few minutes of hacking my lungs out, I lost consciousness.
***
I had brief memories of being stuffed in a coffin. I thought to myself… I'm not dead yet. I tried to fight back but whoever was trying to plant me six feet under was too strong. Eventually, I just closed my eyes and let it happen.
When I opened my eyes again, it was some three weeks later. Of course, I didn't know that at the time. I didn't quite recognize the woman that was checking my IV bag. She was an exotic beauty. She saw my eyes open and bent down to look at me more closely. It was then that I realized I was looking at a Saulite… Very likely Doctor Q'Tar or her clone.
I had a whole host of questions I wanted to ask. She just smiled, and my eyes suddenly got very heavy.
I heard her whisper… “Sleep Admiral… sleep.”
Who was I to ignore a pretty doctor?
I’m told I woke up several more times but honestly, I don’t remember any of that. What I do remember is seeing Lori when I finally opened my eyes and could keep them open.
"Hey, babe… you come here often?" I couldn't believe how hoarse my voice was. If I hadn't known I was the one speaking, I don't think I would have believed it was me… if that makes any sense.
I was rewarded for my efforts with a warm smile. Just to be clear, I’m a fan of warm smiles… especially my wife’s.
“How are you feeling?”
“Forget that… how’s the other guy?”
Lori raised an eyebrow questioningly.
“JD, what other guy?”
“The one driving the truck that must have hit me. I hurt in places that I didn’t even know could hurt. I take it you found a cure?”
Lori’s frown was replaced with an even bigger smile than before… I’m still a fan.
"Your sense of humor is back. That's a good sign. In answer to your question… we have a cure, and it was a team effort. Merab had been on the right track. She was attempting to design a retrovirus but lacked experience with anything even remotely like CRISPR/Cas genome editing techniques to finish her work.”
I must have been feeling better because I actually understood what my wife was saying. A good part of that was also due to my higher than normal IQ. They built a bug to kill a bug.
“I saw a Saulite when I first woke up…”
“Yes, she said you tried to talk briefly. That was Doctor Merab Q’Tar.”
2100.1207.0118 Galactic Normalized Time
The first of the targeted species had been eliminated. Several of the required artifacts had been recovered.
Chapter 6: Dog Tired…
The cure eventually turned out to be one hundred percent effective. It took several tries before everybody that was still alive recovered. The end result, however, was that with no vectors to transmit the Defiler bioweapon… the contagion would eventually die out.
/> As far as we knew, the only surviving Saulites were the twenty-six we had discovered on weapons platform 23. It seemed the Saulites did not name their ships but simply gave them numbers. WP23 was the station we had visited.
The biggest problem the surviving Saulites would face, aside from the psychological aftereffects of genocide, was that their potential gene pool was too small. With only four males, any attempt to establish a viable population was going to be fraught with problems. Extensive gene therapy was going to be necessary to deal with the harmful recessives in their DNA expressing themselves as a result of unavoidable inbreeding. My wife and I talked about this at length with Doctor Merab.
The best solution we could come up with was to let nature take its course and deal with any abnormalities as they occurred. The Saulites now had access to CRISPR/Cas technology. This meant repairing a defective gene was now within the realm of possibility.
My own recovery was slower than I would have liked. The medical technology on the Gilboa was the best in known space to include the struggling Galactic Order, but damaged tissues still took time to heal… even with the best, enhanced, healing technologies.
The result was I didn’t have the stamina I was used to. I found this particularly irritating because I had been out of things for the better part of four weeks.
The J'ni had kept things running even when all but a handful of the humans onboard were incapacitated, but the ship's repairs had essentially come to a stand-still. I was intent on getting things moving again.
As far as I knew, the Stanis system must have been a write off at this point… as well as our sister ship the Faqqa. That last was pure speculation on my part. The Faqqa’s CO was a capable captain named Silvija Tilly. She had been a Federation officer that had distinguished herself by taking down the Indian Battleship, the Antim-Asha, during the liberation of Mars.
I’m told that name in Hindi meant Final Hope. The ship was the largest vessel ever produced by the hand of man. India had two of the behemoths. They had been considered invincible. Apparently, then Lieutenant Commander Tilly hadn’t gotten that memo.
When the U.E.F. Constellation had been destroyed by the Antim-Asha, Tilly’s Captain, Matthew Decker had been killed. Tilly and a handful of others had managed to make it to the escape pods and shuttles.
As luck would have it, Tilly’s shuttle was hit by wreckage and disabled. She was the only one to survive. Without power, she drifted in space for the better part of a week… just so much debris floating around space near the scene of a major battle. When she finally got her engines back online; the Indian Battleship had returned to the scene of the battle.
Why they returned, we would never know.
Lieutenant Commander Tilly waited. Eventually, the Antim-Asha powered down her massive VASMR engines and coasted with the wreckage. Tilly saw her opportunity for vengeance. She somehow managed to coax her shuttle with low compressed gas attitude thrusters into one of the engine exhaust ports on the butt-end of the Indian ship… Did I mention It was a really big sucker? The Indians had never thought to put sensors in that area of the ship because who in their right mind would try such a ridiculous stunt?
Once her shuttle was in place, Tilly set the shuttle’s small fusion core to develop an overload. Next, she disabled all the fail-safes. Fifteen minutes later, after she had jetted away with a powered EVA suit, she watched the fruits of her labor.
The explosion destroyed must of the battleship's propulsion system. The ship still had power and weapons systems, but it was essentially dead in space. Even a ship as big as the Antim-Asha could only take so much when the opposition forces were free to take unlimited potshots at you while you were unable to move.
Tilly had expected to die in her EVA suit once her air supply ran out but again the Admiral commanding the Antim-Asha ordered her rescued once their active scanners had located her. She was treated respectfully as a prisoner of war. It seemed even the enemy recognized this young woman was something special. When he finally surrendered his ship to the Federation fleet, he had insisted as a term of the surrender that it be to none other than the woman who had single-handedly disabled his ship.
Thus, the legend of Silvija Tilly was born.
My hope was that Captain Tilly had been able to jump her ship out of the danger zone. There simply was no way the Faqqa could take on the Defiler fleet that had ambushed the Gilboa alone. In point of fact, we had been in-system so briefly, it was possible the Faqqa was already destroyed, and we just didn't know it yet.
Even if the freshly repaired Yorktown linked up with them, the Skip Drive enhanced Zǎo- Shang destroyer would make little difference. Right now, the Gilboa and the Faqqa were the bulk of the Galactic Order’s naval muscle.
As the Faqqa was likely to be the last ship to be produced by a Galactic Order shipyard for some time… and as the Earth’s first fully redesigned battleship wasn’t expected to launch for another three years… I had a responsibility to use our big boats surgically.
Hopefully, Captain Tilly suppressed her ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ tendencies.
I realized suddenly that my mind had drifted. My body was tired, and it was hard to focus for long periods of time. I had been in a staff meeting… trying to get myself back up to speed on the ship and general situation.
“Whiskers, buddy. I am sorry. I know you were talking about repair estimates. I spaced for a moment. Can you repeat yourself.”
"Dog," my friend said kindly, "there ain't a soul here that won't be understanding what yer going through. Don't you no never mind. Uncle Whiskers will take care of yer ship.
"The Skip drive is fully functional. All the fusion reactors are back online, but we are transplanting a bigger one from WP23 and wiring it into hanger deck five. It's on the opposite side of the ship and should provide us with another layer of redundancy."
“Weapons and shields?” I asked.
“Shields are about ninety-five percent repaired or replaced. We had a big section of the hull that was slagged. We just had to cut that piece out and replace it. Fortunately, WP23 is virtually a starship shipyard all by itself.”
I nodded which was a mistake. My head started swimming. I had really been out of it.
Lori must have seen I was struggling, so she got up and pressed a hypospray against my neck. I heard to soft swish and felt a momentary tinge followed by a boost in energy and a marked decrease in nausea.
“That’s the only one of those you’ll get today. It should keep you on your feet for a few hours then I need you in bed.”
I smirked and looked at her suggestively. What can I say? I have a fully functioning Y chromosome.
Lori just shook her head.
***
Four days later, I was feeling like a new man. The Gilboa was ready to enter the fray again. The Saulites and a few more J’ni elected to join us. The remaining J’ni would continue to repair the W23 platform. Our plan was to jump the platform, when it was ready, to a barren solar system and use it as a hidden base of operation.
“Skip Drive online, Admiral,” Commander Shelby announced as I entered the bridge.
“Very well, Number One. I assume all stations report ready for jump?”
“Affirmative Sir.”
“Very well. Set course for the Stanis system. Set our jump point to four AU closer to the primary than our last jump.”
“Roger that, Sir. Four AU it is.
I toggled my comms for engineering.
“Commander McGraw, please confirm all critical systems are under the control of multiple isolated AI cores.”
“Aye, Admiral. Each system now requires concurrence from four of the five active AIs in order to go online or offline. I don’t think we will be caught with our pants down again.”
“Famous last words, Engineer. We still don’t know how or when our systems got corrupted the first time.”
“There is that, Sir, but only a fool messes with the same dog twice.”
“There is that,” I echoed
as the hint of a smile played across my face.
I turned back to the main viewscreen.
“Helmsman jump the ship.”
The transition into Skip space was smooth. One moment there was a normally distributed starfield… the next, the starfield near the bow of the Gilboa were compressed together while those facing the stern were pulled so far apart that the view almost seemed jet black.
We had three hours to wait before we emerged from Skip space. They were some of the longest three hours of my life. I was just wondering if I shouldn’t grab another small bag of popcorn to go with the coffee that a saint in the form of a yeoman had brought by moments before when the word came in that we were close.
“We are approaching the jump terminus,” Commander Shelby finally announced.
My hand had been idly running through my beard. I pulled it away and brought up the ship-wide comms.
"This is the Admiral speaking. In a few moments, we will be exiting Skip space in the Stanis system. I don't have to remind you what happened the last time we entered this system. I want everybody on their toes and damage control parties ready to fly into action if the need presents itself.
“We expect the enemy to be well and truly gone by now, but we don’t know what surprises they may have left for us. Stay frosty. Riker out.”
“Exiting Skip space now, Lieutenant Heinz announced.”
Again, the transition was smooth. It didn't stay that way. Klaxons almost immediately began to blare. I had expected to go to red alert as soon as we jumped but I was hoping it would be of my own volition and not an automated threat response. We had been down that road once before in this system, and it was not a fond memory.
“Shields up!” I ordered.
“Multiple contacts,” Lieutenant Daniels reported from his sensor station. “Most appear to be just drifting debris, but two objects just lit up fusion drives and are heading in our direction.”
“How far out?” I asked.
“Just under an AU. Maybe fifteen minutes out depending on their acceleration curves,” the Lieutenant answered.
I turned to Shelby. She raised an eyebrow.