by Peter David
Pulaski’s relief was obvious. “Thank you.”
“Is there anything more we can do?” she asked, half-hoping Pulaski would invite her to Terok Nor. Crusher wanted to be busy. She could always say that the situation forced her to disobey the initial orders from Starfleet Medical.
“This just might be enough,” Pulaski said. “Standing by.”
The image went blank.
Crusher tapped her combadge. “Data, please download on the open line to Terok Nor all medical information from the Archaria III incident. Medical only. Let me know when you are finished.”
“Understood,” Data said.
She turned to the captain.
“I know I didn’t follow procedure. I’ll make it right with Starfleet Medical, though. It won’t be a problem for you, Jean-Luc.”
“I’m not worried about that, Beverly.” His tone was warm. “I would have suggested you take the course of action you chose. It’s clearly very bad there.”
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“The Cardassian behind Dr. Pulaski,” the captain said. “That was Gul Dukat himself.”
Crusher instantly knew what the captain was saying. The image of the Archarian bodies came back. Crusher hadn’t been able to save her, but maybe this time the bodies wouldn’t be so numerous that they’d have to pile them in Terok Nor’s infirmary.
“Data to Dr. Crusher.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“All records have been sent.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She looked at the captain. “Now I guess it’s time I faced the music with Starfleet Medical.”
“We face the music,” he said, taking her arm and heading her toward the door. “I was on Archaria III also. Remember?”
The image of the dead bodies came back again. Crusher squeezed the captain’s hand in thanks. “How could I forget?”
Chapter Twenty-one
AH, THE SOUND OF CONVERSATION and laughter in his bar. Quark leaned against the back wall and closed his eyes. How he had missed this. It wasn’t just the sound of the Dabo wheel and the silly girl’s voice crying “Dabo!” or the clink of glasses, or even the silent accumulation of latinum as it made its way from his patrons’ hands to his pockets. No. It was the feeling that he was in a viable business once more.
He was almost grateful to the plague. It had been such a traumatic experience that those who felt they had dodged it were coming into Quark’s, wanting to drink themselves into oblivion. He was going to let them.
“Brother.”
Of course Rom would interrupt Quark’s reverie. Any time Quark felt that things were going his way, he had to be reminded of the presence of his stupid brother.
“What?” Quark asked, opening his eyes. Five more Cardassians were coming into the bar, laughing and slapping each other on the back.
“Brother, I have something to tell you.”
“Well, it can wait,” Quark said. “See those five? They’re new customers and they need to buy drinks.”
“Brother—”
“This is about making profits, Rom,” Quark said. “Remember. ‘A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.’”
“Brother, please don’t quote the rules to me,” Rom said. “I have something to tell you.”
Quark leaned forward. “I’ll make you recite every one of the rules if you don’t get to work.”
“Ah, yes, brother.” Rom scurried toward the center of the bar, balancing a tray precariously on one hand.
Quark shook his head and began to make drinks. He already knew what three of those Cardassians would have. They were regulars, at least when they were well. And they were well now.
A Cardassian stood up in the back. Quark frowned. He had seen this before. He had a sinking sensation in his stomach. Maybe the lighting was bad. Maybe the Cardassian had spilled his drink. Maybe. There had to be some other explanation for the green color of his skin and the way he was swaying.
Quark slid out the side of the bar and hurried toward the Cardassian. If he got the Cardassian out of here before the man collapsed, there might be a chance that no one else would notice. Some kind of chance.
Any kind of chance.
Quark was halfway there when the Cardassian fell backwards.
All noise in the bar stopped. The Cardassian’s companion stood and looked down at his fallen friend.
“This can’t be right,” he said. “He just got over the plague.”
It was enough to start a stampede to the door. Quark grabbed at customers. “Don’t believe them,” he said. “I’m sure they misunderstood. Maybe he had been misdiagnosed. Surely—”
But no one was listening to him. They streamed out as if they were afraid they would suddenly topple over backwards, their skin a lovely shade of lime green. Even the Dabo girl had disappeared.
“Brother,” Rom said.
Quark held up a hand. “Don’t say a word to me. I don’t want to hear it.”
He headed back to the bar. It had taken five hours to fill the place up again, and only two minutes to empty it out. Except for the Cardassian on the floor. Moaning.
“Call a med team, would you, Rom?”
Rom gaped at him. “But brother, last time you made us—”
“I know what I did last time,” Quark said. “There was no one in the bar then. Unless it was my imagination, we had a full bar this time. There’s no hiding this one.”
“All right, brother.” Rom let his tray drop as he stared at the Cardassian.
Quark stared at Rom.
More specifically, Quark stared at Rom’s ear.
On the lobe was a shiny pimple, with a whitehead that looked as if it could burst at any moment.
“Tell me, Rom,” Quark said slowly. “A Cardassian dumped a case of Jibetian beer on your head.”
“No, brother,” Rom said, turning to him. “Well, not since the last time. No one has dumped anything on me.”
“Then do you want to tell me where that pimple came from?” Quark asked, pointing.
Rom clapped a hand over the offending lobe. “I was trying to tell you.”
“You were trying to tell me in a full bar. Now we have an empty bar. How did you get that—pustule—on your ear?”
Rom shrugged. “It grew there.”
“Like hair.”
“Or skin.”
Quark nodded slowly. “And you’re comfortable with that?”
“No,” Rom said. “It itches. I was going to ask you if you had any cream left.”
“I have some cream left,” Quark said.
“I would like to borrow it,” Rom said formally.
“And after you’ve applied it to your ear, you’ll what? Scrape it off so that you can return it to me?”
“No,” Rom said, obviously flustered. “I mean, I would—”
“You want me to give it to you,” Quark said.
“Yes,” Rom said. “But not all of it. Since you need it too.”
“I don’t need it,” Quark said.
“Yes, you do,” Rom said.
“No, I don’t,” Quark said. “I healed days ago. That’s why I’m wondering what happened to you.”
“The same thing that happened to you, brother. It came back.”
Quark reached both hands up slowly and clapped his ears. Beneath his right hand, he felt a lump.
A pimple.
A pustule.
“What did you do to cause this?” Quark asked.
“Nothing,” Rom said. “Maybe the cream didn’t work.”
“Obviously the cream didn’t work,” Quark said. He sank into a chair. “Not that it matters.” He stared at the moaning green Cardassian on his floor. “No one will ever come here again.”
Rom stared at him for a moment, then sat down beside him. “Things are bad, aren’t they?”
Quark nodded. “And they’re getting worse.”
Chapter Twenty-two
PULASKI WAITED UNTIL KELLEC and Narat were seated in the
small medical office’s only two chairs. Governo and Marvig stood against the wall, and Ogawa was just coming in. The room was hot and stuffy, like almost everything on Terok Nor. With six of them, it was going to do nothing but get worse before this short meeting was over.
“Leave that door open,” she said to Ogawa.
“Thank you,” Governo said. Pulaski could see he was already sweating.
She had called this meeting the instant she got back to the medical area with the information from the Enterprise. It had taken fifteen minutes for them all to gather from different parts of the station, enough time for her to go over the data quickly. She didn’t like what she saw, especially the final conclusion Dr. Crusher had put in the notes after the crisis was over.
“Ready?” She glanced at everyone.
“Do it, Katherine,” Kellec said.
She nodded to him. In all the years she had known him, she’d never seen him this worried. Or this tired. The human faces around her all had deep worry carved in them, and Narat was now starting to look more afraid than anything else. But Kellec looked so strained she would have thought him seriously ill if she hadn’t known what he had been through.
“Here’s what the Enterprise was dealing with on Archaria III.” She brought up the information supplied by Dr. Crusher on the screen in front of them. The three-dimensional image of a virus slowly spun, showing all its sides.
“That’s very different from what we’re dealing with,” Kellec said.
And it was. Its shape bore no resemblance at all to the viruses she had spent the last week studying.
“Completely,” Narat said.
“At a glance, I agree,” Pulaski said. “This particular virus would be harmless to any Cardassian or Bajoran—or human, for that matter. This one wasn’t designed for Cardassians or Bajorans or humans. It was designed to strike at cross-species breeds.”
“Designed?” Narat asked.
“Designed,” Pulaski said, “just as the virus we’re dealing with was designed.”
“Did they ever discover who created that one?” Governo asked.
“No,” she said. “They didn’t.”
“Too bad,” Marvig said.
“So why is this important?” Kellec said. “I see no possible connection.”
Pulaski knew when her ex-husband was getting impatient and might just rudely leave.
“I’ll get to that in a moment, Kellec,” she said. “There is a tie, believe me.”
He made a face, but remained in his chair.
She took a deep breath and then touched the console. “This is how the Archaria virus was formed.” She set the screen in reverse motion.
The screen showed a computer image of the DNA of the virus shifting, breaking apart, until finally all that was left was three prions, the smallest life-form known to science. Prions were so tiny that not even transporter biofilters could remove them, so light they could blow on a slight breeze, and strong enough to live through freezing cold.
“The three prions are harmless separately,” Pulaski said, “but when all three were present in the body of a cross-species humanoid, they merged and somehow rewrote their own DNA to form a deadly virus. Watch again.”
She set the screen in forward motion and the three prions joined, changed, and formed the deadly Archaria virus.
“Amazing,” Kellec said.
“So if the virus was killed,” Narat said, “but the three prions remained in the body, the patient was reinfected.”
“Almost at once,” Pulaski said.
“Which is what we’re dealing with here,” Kellec said.
“This is pure evil,” Marvig said.
“Again,” Pulaski said, “I need to caution you all that our patients getting reinfected is just a similar symptom. There might be a completely different cause, we don’t know yet. But at least this gives us a starting place we didn’t have before.”
“So our next step is what?” Governo asked.
Pulaski pointed at the tables where the sick were. “We take a few patients, both Cardassian and Bajoran, and cure them of the virus. Then we watch the prions in their blood to see if this pattern, or something similar, occurs. Once we know that, we might be on the track to a permanent cure.”
“We can hope,” Kellec said.
“You’d better do more than hope, Doctor.”
The voice spun Kellec and Narat around.
Marvig stepped further away from the door.
Pulaski had seen Dukat come in just a second before Kellec spoke. The Gul now stood in the doorway of the medical office. He nodded to her.
“Fighting has broken out in a dozen places on Bajor,” Dukat said, not waiting for a response from Kellec. “If it spreads here I don’t have enough healthy guards to contain it. And if I can’t contain it, the Cardassian fleet will.”
“They’re getting afraid back on Cardassia Prime,” Kellec said. “I thought the mighty Cardassian warrior never showed fear.”
“Kellec!” Pulaski said, making her voice take on the command authority she’d learned over the years. “Now is not the time.”
Dukat nodded to her. He didn’t even bother to smile. He was worried now, and not at all interested in baiting Kellec.
“You’d better listen to her, Bajoran,” Dukat said. “At the moment I am the best friend you have. Find the final cure and find it fast. The Cardassian government will not allow this to reach Cardassia Prime.”
Dukat turned and strode from the room.
Pulaski turned to say something to her ex-husband, but then stopped. His face was as white as she’d ever seen it. Narat was hunched so far over that he looked as if he were going to be sick.
Kellec glanced at Narat. “He means it, doesn’t he?” Kellec asked.
Narat nodded.
“Means what?” Governo asked.
“Yeah,” Marvig said, “what was that all about?”
“The Cardassian fleet will destroy this station and everyone on it—and all of Bajor—to stop this,” Kellec said.
Again the Cardassian doctor nodded, as if destroying an entire planet’s population was something they talked about every day.
For all Pulaski knew, maybe around here they did.
Chapter Twenty-three
KIRA SLIPPED INTO THE SECURITY OFFICE, looking both ways before closing the door. No one saw her go in, which was good. Very good.
The office was empty, of course. The constable was everywhere except where he was supposed to be. She didn’t know how to summon him. Create a ruckus on the Promenade? Who would notice now that the disease was back? Only it wasn’t really back—at least that’s what one of the human medical assistants had told her.
It had never really left.
At least they had found a way to keep everyone from dying. That was a step in the right direction.
She made her way behind the desk and stared at the security console. Cardassian design, of course; but there had been modifications, modifications she didn’t entirely understand. She threaded her fingers together, then eased them forward, cracking the knuckles. Since Odo wasn’t here, she would just play with the console until he arrived. That would get his attention, and she might learn a few things in the process.
She placed a hand over the screen, wondering where to start.
“Touch that,” Odo’s gravelly voice said, “and you will spend the rest of your life in the brig.”
“Oh, you frightened me,” she said, but she moved her hand. Then she looked up. He was standing before her, his brown uniform trim as always. The door was closed, just as she had left it. Had he slid in under it? Or hadn’t she heard him enter?
“You like to take chances, don’t you?” he asked.
She gave him a half smile and shrugged. “One gets used to a certain level of danger.”
“Maybe you do,” he said. “But people who play dangerously around here more often than not get killed.”
“Is that a threat?”
“From me, no,” Odo s
aid. “But if Dukat were to know you were here, then it would be. You need to be more cautious.”
“Actually,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“You want me to teach you to be more cautious?” He actually sounded surprised. And then she realized he was making a joke. Not a very funny one, but it was at least an attempt.
“No,” she said. “I need your help.”
“Well,” he said. “Isn’t that an interesting turn of events.”
She wasn’t used to being a supplicant, especially with someone in a position of authority in a Cardassian government. “I need to get off the station.”
“I thought we discussed that,” he said.
“We did,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. I need your help to leave.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because,” she said. “Kellec Ton has asked me to go to the surface to help him with the research.”
“Kellec Ton?”
“And his ex-wife Pulaski.”
“Why would they want you to go, when Dukat has already sent a team below?”
She stared at him for a moment. He worked for the Cardassians but he had always struck her as different. How different, she didn’t know. And she couldn’t rely on a guess.
“They need independent confirmation of the Cardassian findings.”
“They don’t trust the Cardassian findings, you mean,” Odo said.
“And with cause,” Kira said. “The Cardassians started this thing.”
“It seems to me,” Odo said, “they shouldn’t trust the Bajoran findings either.”
She stared at him.
“But then, it would be the prudent course to get information from both sides and compare. Somewhere in the middle they would find the truth.” He tilted his strange head at her. “Do you have written permission from Kellec Ton to leave the station?”
He was playing with her again. Why did this shape-shifter always make her feel off-balance? Because she had never encountered anyone like him before? Or because he knew how to get to her when no one else did?
“Of course I don’t have written permission,” she said.