“It’s the hair that smells the worst,” she’d overheard Doctor McCoy say. They were on their way to Regula I at best speed following their first battle with Reliant. Time enough to count the casualties and mop up.
McCoy was doing the requisite autopsy that would confirm Midshipman Peter Preston’s cause of death, talking half to himself and half to the three cadets aboard—one RN and two paramedic trainees—just qualified enough to serve as fill-in sickbay staff.
Saavik, at loose ends, had waited until Kirk was back in the command chair and fielding a dozen decisions at once and finally glanced up to see her standing at attention barely inches from his elbow.
“Orders, sir?”
“Make yourself useful,” Kirk had said, and she’d taken that to mean, “Go somewhere else and see what needs doing.”
She’d stopped at sickbay first, simply because it was on the way to engineering, but McCoy had seen her and waved her off. He knew she and Peter had been close.
“You kind of expect burned human flesh to smell like barbecue, but it doesn’t …” he’d gone on as she lingered in the doorway, unable to look away from the oddly peaceful expression on Peter’s face. Of all the ways one could die on Hellguard, she’d never seen anyone burned before. “We rarely cook a whole animal, except maybe at a luau, and even then we remove the internal organs first and singe off the hair …”
“Doc, does this have to be done right now?” one of the cadets had piped up squeamishly, concerned at seeing the old man steady himself against the table before beginning.
“No better time!” McCoy had barked. “Don’t know but there may be a lot more casualties before this is over. If you don’t have the stomach for it, just say so and stand down!”
He’d glowered at each of them in turn, and they’d resumed cutting the scorched uniform away from flesh and preparing the body under the harsh, unrelenting light.
“As I was saying,” McCoy continued, “it’s the smell of the hair that stays in the back of your throat for days. Hair and nails, as I’m sure you learned in Anatomy 101, are made of keratin, which is loaded with cysteine, a sulfur-based amino acid. Closest thing to fire and brimstone you’ll smell on this side of the Styx. Cerebrospinal fluid, now, that gives off a sickly-sweet smell …”
Was the present nothing more than a fulcrum between past and future? Saavik wondered. And wasn’t the release of emotion supposed to make one feel better?
“I do not understand,” she said when she could breathe again. She swept away the disgrace of tears that no one but Amanda would ever see. “It should be of comfort to me that no more of the Hellguard survivors will die. There should be great satisfaction in knowing that Sarek’s career and reputation are undamaged, and that his overtures to the Klingons can proceed apace. Why then—?”
“—do you feel so awful?” Amanda supplied. “I don’t hear anything about Saavik in that conversation.”
The two had taken shelter from the midday sun beneath an ancient Kamor tree, which had defied a thousand years of adversity to spread its roots and branches a hundred meters in all directions. The shade it provided was a realm away from the heat beyond, cool and inviting. Local legend had it that an entire tribe had sheltered here for a season when the sandstorms were particularly bad. One of their number had left behind a stone plaque marked with the ancient runes of a lost language in homage to the tree. For now, the overarching branches offered safety to a tribe of only two, protecting them from a metaphysical danger.
“I do not understand,” Saavik said again.
“I think you do,” Amanda replied. “You’ve lost a dear friend in Tolek, and you’ll spend a great deal of time second-guessing whether you could have done anything to save him. In time I’m hoping you will come to terms with the fact that what happened to him and the others was not your fault. You’ve devoted almost a year of your life to a mission that might have ended badly, through no fault of yours. The anxiety of that alone, added to everything that went before. When do you give yourself credit for what you have done and allow yourself time to grieve?”
“I still do not know what killed Tolek and the others. If it is some bioweapon that the Romulans will use again, my task is not complete.”
“There are some tasks that even you must acknowledge you cannot complete alone,” Amanda said with a mysterious smile.
It wasn’t until they’d returned to ShiKahr that Saavik understood what she meant. She was almost beyond surprise to find Sarek in the main parlor in quiet conversation with Mikal.
• • •
Seeing her standing in the pool of late afternoon light from one of the high clerestory windows in the parlor, Mikal found himself on his feet, speechless for once in his life.
With everything you’ve been through, he thought, have you never wondered, even for a moment, what’s become of me in all the time you were away? You’d be well within your rights to assume I’d returned to Deema III without you, and with what you know of me, of my restlessness, my impatience, my often rash assumptions, you’d expect nothing less than that, in the absence of any explanation from me, I’d long since have categorized those few magic days as an aberration and consigned them to memory. If you thought of me at all, I hope it was at least a little fondly.
But as for false assumptions …
Yes, to all appearances I’d been slacking off—
assigning more and more of the workload on Deema III to my team, the task of building a language base to the Betazed Loth, stepping aside for Mironova to lay the diplomatic groundwork. What was I doing in those long hours alone in my quarters or sequestered in one of the lesser-used labs? they all wondered. Brooding, most of them thought, and left me alone.
Chaffee’s comm officer might have told you about the coded communiqués flying back and forth from my personal comm to the far-flung corners of the quadrant, corners where, if one were curious, and comm officers usually were, one might make note of the fact that Ambassador Sarek was in the vicinity.
So it seems Sarek and I have been in communication for quite some time. What might that mean? It might mean no more than a shared interest in science, or as much as a particular interest in a Vulcan scientist of our acquaintance.
I will tell you, if I find the courage to open my mouth, about how, more than once, mysterious parcels arrived for me aboard Chaffee, having made their circuitous way round about the quadrant in diplomatic pouches, which exempted them from the usual scans and security precautions. As a matter of protocol, these parcels landed on Mironova’s desk, but if she expected an explanation whenever I came to retrieve them, there was none forthcoming.
That’s only one of the many things I will tell you, if only I can find the courage to open my mouth.
Saavik knew none of what passed through Mikal’s mind in the few seconds it took him to spring to his feet and cross the room to her, seconds that subjectively felt like minutes to him. She only wondered why Mikal was here, and what it was she was feeling.
Yes, feeling. There was no logic in his presence here, after she had snubbed him in the street, and no logic to the flutter somewhere in the vicinity of her heart when they made eye contact. Something passed across the space between them, something ineffable, perhaps undefinable. Both began to speak at once.
“I’m sorry—” each said, then stopped.
“I did not mean to pass you in the street,” she
said. “I—”
“I never meant to doubt you. I should have—” he said.
They stopped. Discreetly, Amanda took Sarek’s arm and led him away. Mikal shared the pool of light now, arms’ length from her. They might have touched, but didn’t. Dust motes danced in the chasm.
Mikal sighed, tugged at his ears, setting the earrings jangling, tried again. “When you went off suddenly, without explanation, I—”
“As logically you should have.” She was as motionless as he was animated, hands at her sides, all but at attention. “Whereas I should have found a way to tell
you—”
“How could you, without giving away your mission? I understand now.”
“But you did not at the time.”
“Can you blame me?” Silence. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. There should be no blame on either side.” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “This isn’t working! Come with me—” He took her hand, and she did not protest. “There’s something I have to show you.”
Chaffee hung in drydock above Vulcan, work crews in pressure suits going over her exterior, the conn at station keeping, no one else aboard. The labs, of course, were kept running at all times, analyzing data, preserving samples, awaiting the next mission. Saavik and Mikal, their heads together as they pored over data, were using the labs to solve a mystery.
“Rapamycin,” Saavik said at last, remembering a conversation with Mikal a lifetime ago, about how an anomaly found in the soil on a remote island in Earth’s South Pacific had been cultivated into a powerful antibiotic, only one of countless examples in the medical armamentarium.
“Pretty much,” Mikal agreed. Anyone listening in on their conversation would have had no clue what they were talking about.
“But how did you get access to all of this data?” Saavik wondered.
“Not easily. The first thing I had to do was try to read your mind from half a quadrant away, so I could get into your files. I pooled all the data you and Tolek had amassed, and went looking for things you might have overlooked. That’s when I found that all of the victims had three distinct alleles in common, but they varied just enough from X to Y chromosomes to make them difficult to detect, particularly by a scientist up to her pretty pointed ears on an important Starfleet mission being pestered almost daily not only by a layman on the verge of hysteria—yes, I know, never speak ill of the dead, but if Tolek hadn’t been so insistent … And then there was that other pest, that bald-headed guy who had other motives in mind—”
“Mikal—”
“Quiet, please. Not finished. So first I isolated the three alleles, just on a hunch. Then I did some pestering of my own. That’s where Sarek came in.”
“Sarek?”
“He was the only person I could think of with enough clout to get actual tissue samples from the three dead. Well, four. I was able to get samples from Tolek on my own. Don’t ask!” he said, when it looked as if she was about to. “Let’s just say the biggest flaw in Vulcan logic is honesty. A species that spends its life trying not to lie is very easily lied to. Okay, fast-forward, Sarek used his clout with T’Saan—not that I knew her name at the time, much less that they were cousins—and got me the tissue samples. That’s what was in those diplomatic pouches Galina was so curious about. I wonder if I’ll ever tell her the whole story …”
Saavik found herself strangely exhilarated. Listening to Mikal, watching the animation in his face as he described the process by which he’d solved the mystery, was as fascinating as seeing the puzzle pieces fit together beneath the microscope, on the spectrograph, on the screens surrounding them, as he explained.
“I could let her figure it out on her own, but I’ll probably tell her. Any other ship’s captain would have tossed me in the brig, civilian or no, for being so lazy on this run, but I trusted my team, and I needed every spare minute to crack this thing. For all I knew, you were meant to be the next victim. That part was true, wasn’t it?”
“If I had not followed Narak’s instructions, I have no doubt he would have had me killed,” Saavik said, though even as she said it, she would never be entirely sure. She still wondered whether he’d immolated himself solely to rob the V’Shar of proof as to her paternity, or if the look she’d seen in his eyes in his last moment truly was one of despair.
“I couldn’t let that happen!” Mikal stopped his mad peregrinations around the lab long enough to take her hands in his. “And not just because we’d come to be more than friends. This”—he indicated the readouts—“wasn’t the only puzzle to be solved. You do realize that?”
She hadn’t, and was about to say so, but he was off again.
“So, okay, step one, try to read Saavik’s mind and guess her pass codes so I could access her data. Wangle tissue samples from the V’Shar by way of Sarek. Isolate the three alleles and note how they’d mutated from the healthy body to the dead one. Then figure out what substance or process in the known universe could affect that mutation and leave no trace when it was done. Simple, right?”
“Rapamycin,” Saavik said again.
“And a leap of faith,” Mikal added.
“‘Nothing that is, is unimportant.’ Worm kept telling me the same thing, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
Saavik took a seat, if only to stay out of Mikal’s way as he continued to careen about the lab.
“You do know the V’Shar vetted every one of us before allowing you to go on the original mission to Deema III?” Saavik nodded. “Pure coincidence, if you believe in such things. They might just as easily have secreted you away somewhere on Vulcan for safekeeping and tried to figure this thing out on their own. Then you and I would never have met, and I’d have had
no … emotional investment in figuring out what killed the others. Oh, somebody would have figured it out eventually, if only by secreting a scientist or two into the empire, but it might have taken years or even decades.
“But there’s Sagan’s ‘star stuff’ theory, that everything in this universe, at least, is in harmony with everything else. Some scientists extend that to medicine—if there’s a disease, there’s also a concomitant cure. Why does a common yew tree yield tamoxifen, a primitive cure for certain cancers? Why does a wildflower yield a substance that controls heart rate? Why does a substance found in the soil of the Romulan homeworld interact with those three alleles to cause an overgrowth in
copper-based platelet cells that literally clog up every major organ and cause death? And why does the enantiomer for that substance—”
“Wait,” Saavik pleaded. Ordinarily she could follow any scientific explanation if sufficient facts were present, but Mikal’s rapid-fire delivery, or perhaps the time she had spent away from a world in which things proceeded in an orderly fashion, gave her a sense that she was missing something. “Repeated examination of the bodies from crude autopsy to submolecular sampling found no such clotting.”
Mikal’s grin was almost feral. “That’s the beauty of this thing. While the blood is circulating, it proliferates. As soon as a clot large enough to impact a major organ system—heart, lung, brain—causes infarction and death, the anomalous cells literally evanesce away. You’d have to be in the room at the moment the person died and perform an autopsy immediately in order to catch these little demons in the act.”
Saavik considered. “And the likelihood of medical personnel being on hand at that precise moment …”
“Much less willing to say to the relatives, ‘Hey, your adopted son is dead, time of death such-and-such; I’m cutting now.’”
“Indeed. Then how did you—?”
“I didn’t at first. I was looking at only half of the puzzle. The soil in the Kiral Valley on Deema III was the other half. Watch this.”
Using a scanning electron microscope, Mikal selected a tissue sample marked TOLEK, growing autonomously on an agar substrate, and added a purplish granular-looking substance one cell at a time. Within seconds, the sample had been transformed into a single massive green clot. As he separated the clot from the growth medium, it began to dissipate.
“Nevertheless,” Saavik said, impressed but still skeptical, “the time involved in a single clot, multiplied by every major organ system …”
“… would be several hours. Which is why …”
Choosing a second sample, he treated it the same way, only this time, before removing it from the growth medium, he treated it with a second substance that, under maximum magnification, Saavik could see was an enantiomer, an almost mirror image or “left-handed” version of the original molecule.
The silence that ensued w
as palpable, as electrically charged as the silence in the parlor when the two of them had stood in a pool of light, wondering what would happen next. That time it had been a silence of emotion. This time it was a silence of discovery.
“I suppose,” Saavik said carefully, “that if I asked you how you obtained the killer molecule, which you say is found only on the Romulan homeworld—”
“Known to be found on the Romulan homeworld,” he corrected her. “It might be extant throughout the empire, but this much we know about.”
“I stand corrected. But you will not tell me how you acquired this?”
Mikal grinned. “I would if I could, but I don’t actually know. Sarek might, though. You can ask him. As for your next question, it was Worm who told me about the Kiral Valley.”
It seemed almost too easy, and Saavik said as much.
“Easy for you to say. Worm kept trying to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen, because s/he kept asking about you and I didn’t want to hear. But when the team came to me and said there was one last place on the maps where anomalies had been appearing and disappearing for centuries, and why hadn’t we gone there yet? I sent them on their own, Jaoui and Cheung, with Graana in charge. They brought back several dozen plant specimens, complete with root systems, and examination of the soil around the root systems revealed traces of this stuff.
“The rifts had closed by then. We’d have to go back this time next year to try to trace those soil samples and find out if they’re native, if they come from somewhere in Romulan space, or from somewhere else entirely. I’ve already submitted the paperwork; this one’s not getting away from me. We can’t stop the Romulans from continuing to develop killer organisms, but we can try to have something on hand to counteract them when they do.”
Nineteen
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 28