Bitter Medicine

by Dave Galanter

  “The canteens. There’s a lot of food. I like most of it.”

  Lense nodded and continued hovering over the recently beamed-over equipment she’d set up on one of the sickbay’s beds, but she was sure to make eye contact with the boy often. Gomez was focusing all her efforts on venting the radiation in the engineering compartment, and Corsi was helping her. The doctor was happy to have Dobrah’s company, considering she was claustrophobically confined to her EVA suit. And the way he was talking to her, Dobrah was ecstatic to have the fellowship as well.

  “What kinds of food don’t you like?” Lense asked, and noticed she was a bit hungry herself.

  “Oh, all the crumbly stuff. Tobah sticks and sanbell butter. Things like that.”

  A smile turning up the corners of her lips, Lense couldn’t help but notice that the universal translator was especially good with duplicating the tone of Dobrah’s age. His speech was more…informal. As time went on, and the translator “knew” him better, Lense supposed it sounded more like he would really sound to her if she knew his language.

  “I don’t like things with seeds,” she told him. “Sesame seed rolls or poppy bread.”

  Dobrah wrinkled his nose in sympathetic distaste and slid down from his seat on the far bed. He slowly made his way closer to Lense as he looked over her array of scanners and computers with mild interest. “Are you going to cure me?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

  Pushing out a long breath, Lense took a step back from her work. “You’re not sick.”

  “I’m the only one who isn’t.”

  For the first time it occurred to Lense that the boy might know quite a lot about his situation. It was obvious by what little of the sickbay logs she’d been able to salvage—most were not on the one console they’d gotten to work—that extensive tests had attempted to figure out why he was immune.

  “Do you know a lot about this disease?”

  He paused for a moment, perhaps not unsure what to say but more to gather his thoughts. He moved his head from shoulder to shoulder in a motion Lense had discovered was rather like a shrug. “I know I can’t get it, but I have it like everyone else.”

  “You’re a carrier.”

  “Yes. I wasn’t really that scared of you when I saw you. I was more scared you’d catch the Pocheeny.”

  “That’s what it’s called?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you think we’d get…Pochieny?”

  “Pocheeny.”

  “Why did you think we’d be infected if we were in these containment suits?”

  “My mother used to wear one, too. She died of it. I killed her.”

  The words sliced into Lense and she took his shoulders in her arms and kneeled down. “No. Dobrah, it’s not your fault.”

  “I can never leave this ship,” he told her, rolling his head in a Shmoam-ag nod. “I kill people.”

  “Then we’re just going to have to cure you,” Lense told him, and as soon as the words left her lips she felt they were a mistake. And yet, she continued. “And then you won’t have to worry about it anymore, okay?”

  “I like you,” he said, his thin lips flattening into an innocent smile. “You remind me of my mother.” Quickly the smile turned into a terrible frown. “I—I don’t want to kill you, too.”

  She pulled him close, embracing him, and he hugged his arms around her neck very, very strongly. She hadn’t known him long, but she wanted to cure him now—to make sure he didn’t live in fear of killing others, and more important…alone.

  “He knows he’s a carrier,” Lense told Gomez and Corsi as they took a meal break back on the Kwolek. Lense took a bite from her turkey sandwich. It was the first she’d eaten in over twelve hours, and she needed the energy. She was also glad to be out of the EVA suit, and even though it had given her complete mobility, she felt the need to stretch as if she finally had room to do so.

  “You told him, or he already knew?”

  “He knew.” Lense chuckled as she gulped a little juice. “He said he was hiding from us to protect us.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I think he was hiding to protect himself and us both, actually. But it’s sweet that he wants to be protective. He’s such a boy.”

  “You sound like you really know him,” Corsi said. “We’ve only been here a day.”

  “We’ve talked nonstop. It’s actually been a bit hard to concentrate on my work sometimes, but I have found out more about this virus.”

  Gomez gulped some Earl Grey tea from a mug. “Anything we need to report to the captain?”

  “Not yet. I think I’d have trouble explaining it to someone who isn’t a biologist at this point. It’s all data, not a conclusion.” Lense looked under the bread. She’d forgotten mustard. Oh well. “How about you?”

  “We’ve vented enough radiation to enter main engineering. If we don’t determine where the radiation is coming from soon, it will build up again—with us inside. I wish we had some detailed schematics, but the computer core is too close to engineering and there’s nothing stored locally on any console we’ve found. You wouldn’t have been able to bring up anything in sickbay if there weren’t personal files stored there and not yet dumped to the central core.”

  “That explains why there’s only a few days’ worth of files,” Lense said more to herself than the others. “Once I’m done mapping the entire viral genome, I’ll probably need that core data from Dobrah’s mother’s research if I’m going to cure him.”

  Gomez looked up from her bowl of noodles. “Cure him?”

  “There must be a cure. No one engineers something this complex without there being a cure coded in somewhere.”

  Since Corsi didn’t usually involve herself in the scientific discussions, Lense was surprised to hear her pipe in: “You’ve never known a designed virus to not have a cure?”

  “Of course. Bastards like T’sart who worked for the Romulan Empire, or the Cardassian Crell Moset…”

  “Then how do you know—”

  “I’m going to cure him. I’m going to find a way.” She said it again, and the words clattered to the deck like a dropped dinner plate.

  “Okay,” Gomez said slowly, but Lense had turned away and couldn’t see her expression.

  “I need to get back.”

  Beaming directly into an EVA suit seemed as if it would be tricky, though Lense knew it was not. Still, she felt uneasy until the process was finished and she was able to step away from the beam-down point. Dobrah appeared from nowhere to greet her.

  “You are back!”

  “Yes,” she smiled through her transparent visor. “We had dinner. Did you eat?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, why don’t you go get something and bring it back? Keep me company while I work?” She patted her gloved hand on the top of his smooth head.

  “Sure!” He ran off and was back quickly, before Lense really had time to set up her next experiment. She decided to talk while he ate, and so she only monitored the continuing viral genome-mapping the computer was performing.

  Dobrah talked and talked, and when Corsi and Gomez beamed back down he said hello to them cheerfully and then continued. Lense worked on, listening happily if not completely.

  At some point into the night, Dobrah fell asleep and Lense was able to work uninterrupted. She didn’t know if this was normally the room in which he made his bed, but it likely was. Their sickbay was relatively shielded from the radiation pouring from the ship’s engines, and the boy was perhaps smart enough to—

  No. That wasn’t why. This was where his mother had worked. No wonder it was here he’d spent most of his time.

  His mother…where was she? Why were there no bodies of the crew, of his family?

  Perhaps they were somewhere.

  Grabbing a tricorder and setting it to scan for Shmoam-ag DNA, Lense followed a path out into the corridor after telling the device to ignore Dobrah’s life sign.

  As she walked, ve
ctoring this way and that as the halls would allow, she homed in on the DNA signatures without life, and wondered if she was fooling herself into thinking she could cure Dobrah. She didn’t think so, but she instinctively knew it had been a mistake to promise it. In mentioning it to Gomez and Corsi, she’d been hoping their reaction would be mild and unconcerned, in an attempt to make herself feel better about having said it. Their reaction was anything but. She tried to think positively, however. The Sherman’s Planet plague had seemed impossible at the start as well. There was a confidence in her now that hadn’t been there since before the war. Confidence alone didn’t bring results…but it helped.

  “I’m not so sure I can do this,” Corsi said in complaint.

  Gomez didn’t have time to argue the point. “You’re all I have, Domenica. This is far more complicated than I thought. This engine design is—”

  Corsi smiled. “Totally alien?”

  Laughing briefly, Gomez asked, “Did you just make a joke?”

  “It’s been known to happen.” Corsi attempted to hold in place the tubing Gomez needed as the engineer laser-soldered it into place. “What exactly are we doing, anyway?”

  “You’re holding a conduit in place against a valve so I can seal it. Then we’re going to attempt to reroute plasma to an area where their cooling units still work.”

  “And you know how all this works just from the schematic on the back of the panel we pried off?”

  “Partly.” Gomez grunted as she struggled to get her hand where it needed to be in the cramped space.

  “Only partly?”

  “The other part is guessing.”

  Corsi felt her brow wrinkle. “Uh…I don’t like the sound of guessing.”

  “Give me some credit, here,” Gomez said as she fired the hand laser and melted the rim of the conduit onto the valve. “It’s educated guessing.”

  “Am I going to blow up?” Corsi asked, feeling some of the laser’s heat find its way up to her hand.

  “Not on your own,” Gomez said dryly.

  “That’s not funny at all.” Pressing her lips into a thin line, Corsi took her hand away from the now attached conduit when Gomez motioned for her to.

  “Relax. The danger here is that we’ll have worse radiation leaks.” She got up as Corsi did, and they both slid the access panel back into place. “Okay, I’m done with this one.”

  “This one?” Corsi asked. “How many more are there?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You know why I like my job better than yours?” Corsi asked as she picked up the tool kit to her left as Gomez did the same to the one at her right.

  “Why?”

  “Because if we do blow up, at least I won’t know it’s about to happen.”

  Chapter

  4

  “Wong, hold us out here at twenty thousand kilometers. Match the Allurian vessel’s drift rate.” Captain Gold studied the ship on the main viewscreen. It was a ramshackle design, he thought, more for function than form. And even function wasn’t that great. The Allurians were often scavengers, and their ships could look like mishmoshed, makeshift afterthoughts.

  “Aye, sir. Matching.”

  “Shabalala?” Gold turned toward tactical.

  “Scanning, sir,” Shabalala reported. “Minimal power output. Reactors are online but engines are at null thrust.”

  “Their drift vector suggests inertia from last plotted course,” Wong said.

  Shabalala nodded his agreement. “There are no weapons charged, and their shields are down. Deflector is on—probably automatic.”

  “Haznedl? Any response to our hails?” Gold stepped down from his command chair and rubbed his left palm against his side to stifle an itch.

  “None, sir.”

  “Life signs?”

  “None, sir.”

  A knot was beginning to form on Gold’s neck. They were not finding any helpful information so far, and it made him uneasy. “There were two Allurian ships. Scan the area. See if we can find the second one.” He made his way back to the center seat. “And let’s put out a warning buoy on this one. Just in case.”

  “This ship needs more than one person can do.” Frustrated, Gomez tossed her hyperspanner back into the tool kit and twisted her neck back and forth, without a decent way to massage it within the EVA suit.

  “What am I, an overstuffed chair?” Corsi asked.

  “You’re a help, Domenica, but you’re not an engineer. We’ve been at this for four and a half days now, and moved maybe an inch in shoring up these weaknesses.” Gomez pulled herself toward the tool kit and reached for the spanner again, deciding to give it another try. “We really need Pattie on this one. This ship is a structural nightmare. It’s an ion engine system, very complex, and at least three hundred years old. It doesn’t look like it’s had maintenance in half that time.”

  “Are you saying it’s a lost cause?”

  Gomez sighed. “I don’t know. It is if I’m the only one working on it. Maybe if I had the full team…”

  “For now all you have is me.”

  Gomez smiled. “Is this a pep talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we might just keep this engine from exploding.” Gomez pulled in a deep breath. “Back to work?”

  Gesturing to the panel in which they’d been toiling, Corsi said, “Lead the way.”

  He was sleeping so soundly, looking so peaceful, Lense didn’t want to have to wake him. She wondered how often his sleep was this serene. He’d slept in the sickbay as she worked every night for the last three nights. When they first found Dobrah, he had all the signs of an emotionally disturbed, lonely, abandoned child—rocking himself, repeating to them that they must leave him alone. His turnaround was almost instant. That suggested to Lense that the boy was still very disturbed, but in a period of relief due to his first companionship in…how long?

  She hadn’t yet been able to figure that out, but had a better idea once she’d toured the ship looking for Shmoam-ag DNA. But that had only given her a guess. A more in-depth look into his biological makeup would pin it down, and that was why she needed to wake him. She’d lost track, however, of how long he’d been asleep. She leaned down, almost but not quite caressing his smooth forehead, from his thick brow back across his scalp. She’d promised him a cure. What if she had to settle for his relocation to some Starfleet Medical isolation ward? He’d have company at least, but…what kind of a life would that be?

  “Dobrah,” she called softly, “wake up.”

  The boy stirred lightly, groaning a bit, thick with sleep.

  “Dobrah?” She shook him just a bit, pushing into his arm with her protected hand.

  His unfocusing eyes looked up glassily, reflecting in the light. “Mama?”

  Innocent and sweet, the word cut right through her heart.

  “No, honey. It’s Elizabeth.”

  “E-liz,” he said groggily. “You’re still real.”

  She nodded. “I need to run a test on you. Can you lie straight for me and not move?”

  “I can do that.” He straightened, lie back, and seemed to go right back to sleep.

  “Good,” she told him, and patted his stomach. “Sit tight.”

  Retreating to one of her large scanners, Lense pointed the main sensor at the boy and began her intensive scan. The results poured in, flooding her screen. After several minutes the scan was done. She ran it again. And then again. Dobrah slept, and she ran it a last time. The results did not change.

  Dobrah wasn’t just a carrier. He was a virus factory. And he had been that for a very long time. But there was something else that worried Lense, and the next scan would have to be on herself.

  Repositioning the scanner to the next bed over, Lense laid herself down and gave the computer a command to begin the scan remotely.

  The scanner would have trouble getting through the EVA suit, but for her purposes that was just fine.

  After what seemed like too long a time, the computer bleeped that
it had finished, and Lense swooped toward the display screen.

  She ignored the data on her own body after a cursory glance confirmed she was not infected, and focused on information about her EVA suit. She then went back to the finished genome map of the virus, and all the reports on different lipid profiles from selected virions. It was all as she suspected, and horribly so. She compared it with the data on Dobrah’s clothes…and knew she needed to contact Captain Gold.

  “Lense to Gomez.”

  “Gomez here. Go ahead.”

  “Can you spare Corsi up here for a while?”

  “Problem, Doctor?”

  “No. Well, possib—” She wasn’t even sure where to begin about the problems this could cause, for them and especially for Dobrah. “No. I just need to—Why don’t you and I talk to the captain while Domenica stays with Dobrah?”

  There was a long pause, and Lense imagined Gomez was exchanging a worried glance with Corsi.

  “On our way. Gomez out.”

  Lense pushed out a breath, and the slightest amount of condensation formed in front of her mouth on the EVA suit’s visor window. It was a long wait, at least for her, until her crewmates arrived in sickbay.

  First through the door, Gomez immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Waving off the concern with both hands, Lense assured her nothing desperate had happened. “It’s not a crisis,” she admitted. “But it is…there’s something about this virus that is different than most. And we need to let the captain know.” She looked at Corsi and motioned to Dobrah. “In case he wakes up, will you stay here with him? Let him know we’ll be back?”

  Corsi nodded as Gomez ordered the computer to beam them out of their EVA suits and back to the shuttle.

  As soon as she’d materialized from the transporter beam, Lense grabbed the nearest tricorder and began scanning for the Pocheeny virus.

  “What?” Gomez asked as Lense ran the tricorder’s scanner over both of them. “What’s wrong?”

  Closing the tricorder with a snap, Lense let out a sigh of relief. “Nothing. Thank God.”

  “Okay, Elizabeth, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”