Out of the Cocoon

by William Leisner

  She turned to Granger, blinking in disbelief. “You’re asking me to do your inventory?”

  Granger pretended to be surprised by Lense’s less than enthusiastic reaction. “You just told me you were here to assist us in any way you could. Keeping an accurate accounting of—”

  “I understand the importance of a physical inventory.” Lense tried to keep her tone steady. She in fact did appreciate how vital accurate supply counts were and how the mundane task tended to fall by the wayside—a lesson she learned the hard way during a search-and-rescue mission her first year as Lexington CMO. “However, I would think you would want to put my talents to a better use.”

  “You’re saying that the task I’ve asked you to do is beneath you?” Granger smirked at her. “That’s rather an elitist attitude.”

  “Starfleet doctors are the elite, though, aren’t they?”

  Both Granger and Lense turned, more than a little surprised that the teenaged girl was speaking up in Lense’s defense. “They’re the ones sent off to deal with the diseases found on all the new worlds the Federation discovers,” she elaborated. “Ninety-five of the last one hundred winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine were Starfleet doctors. Ninety-seven percent of the papers published in the Federation Journal of Medicine are by Starfleet—”

  Granger’s face darkened like a summer thunderstorm. “If I had wanted your opinion, Miss McClay—”

  “I was only stating facts,” McClay said, showing no sign whatsoever of being intimidated by the minister. “I couldn’t give an opinion of Starfleet doctors if I wanted, since I’ve only ever met the one. And it would be unfair to judge all of them based on my opinion of Dr. Pulaski.”

  Granger simply glared at his young subordinate. He was, however, spared the need to formulate any dignity-saving response by the sound of an alarm blaring through the corridors. Granger started, with a look Lense recognized as one of horrified disbelief. He spared Lense a quick glance, then turned and headed for the source of trouble at a run. Lense and Konya did not hesitate to follow.

  They burst through several sets of swinging doors, down hallways lined with ashen-faced hospital staffers, frozen by fear into inactivity. All of this was new to them; they had never known the unpredictability and randomness of war or epidemic outbreak.

  “Victor!”

  A woman popped out of a doorway two-thirds of the way down the corridor as they turned a corner, dressed in dark gray surgical garb. She motioned to Granger to hurry, and the older man put on an extra burst of energy and threw himself into the room. Lense, running two steps behind him, nearly smacked into his back where he had stopped just inside the doorway, keeping his distance from the occupant on the far end of the room.

  Lense tilted her head, and saw in the bed a woman with the same face as the doctor who had frantically directed them here. This face, however, was covered with open sores, and twisted grotesquely as she thrashed in pain. The shimmer of a sterile force field enveloped her bed, and two Bringloidi orderlies held on to her arms through the energy screen, trying to keep her from throwing herself to the floor. A cacophony of beeping and bleating and buzzing came from the bank of monitors clustered around the woman’s bed.

  “Sue—Dr. DiCamino—what happened?” Granger asked, not making any move to get closer to the patient.

  Sue DiCamino, clearly shaken, stammered out her answer: “I…she…one minute she was fine, then she started complaining about the temperature, then all of a sudden…”

  As Lense listened distractedly, she watched the woman’s convulsions lessen in intensity, though not because her condition was improving. Without thinking, Lense wove around Granger and DiCamino, snapping the tricorder out of the pouch on her hip and flipping it open in a single fluid movement. She set her medkit at her feet as she pressed herself past the orderlies and swept the tricorder’s remote scanner over the convulsing woman’s chest and abdomen.

  “What are you—Get away from her!” Lense heard Victor Granger bark behind her, but she wouldn’t have obeyed him even without the shocking report she was getting from her tricorder. The convulsions were being triggered by a fist-sized tumor attached to the woman’s pituitary gland…and growing at a visible rate.

  “My God…stasizine, fifty cc’s,” she called out of habit, though aware she had no nurse to hand her a hypospray loaded with the drug. She set the tricorder on the edge of the bed and turned to retrieve her medkit.

  She was momentarily surprised to find Kara McClay standing at her side. She held her arms outstretched, presenting Lense with her medkit, fully opened flat, with the contents arranged in their padded recesses like a standard sickbay instrument tray. Lense met her eyes for a split second, before grabbing the hypospray (set, as per standard, at the edge closest to her; either by intuition or chance, the young woman had gotten the orientation correct), adjusting its settings, and pressing the nozzle to the patient’s neck. The gauges above her head, which displayed the patient’s name as Lana DiCamino, fell from their extreme positions down to more moderate levels. Her convulsing muscles went slack in relief; only her chest continued to rise and fall in a normal respiration rhythm.

  “Will she be okay now?” McClay asked softly.

  Lense retrieved her tricorder and took a new reading. “For the moment,” Lense answered, making special note that the question had not come from Granger or Sue DiCamino. “The tumor has stopped growing…and it looks like it may be receding a bit.”

  “Tumor?” said DiCamino, looking utterly stunned.

  Given the rate of growth she’d just witnessed, Lense suspected there hadn’t been any sign of a malignancy more than five minutes ago. But with DiCamino still frozen halfway across the room from her patient, and Granger glowering at her as if she were still nothing but a nuisance, Lense didn’t feel like cutting them any slack. “Yes, a tumor. And not just in her brain; there are abnormal growths all through her endocrine system. What sort of treatment have you been giving her? Or have you even gotten close enough to treat her at all?”

  “You are out of line, Doctor!” Victor Granger shouted, eyes flaring dangerously.

  “So what if I am?” Lense shot back, matching Granger’s heated tone. “In case you didn’t notice, I just had to save this woman’s life for you!”

  “And where were you two days ago when this started? Who do you suppose held these people back from the brink of death long enough for you to ‘save’ them now?” Granger’s nostrils were flaring. “We’ve been fighting this thing around the clock, fighting for our survival. And you dare to come down here with your Starfleet arrogance and scold us for how we’re dealing with a disease that you’re not even susceptible to?” His lips curled back into a feral snarl. “Get out of my hospital. Get off my planet, and don’t come back!” He spun toward the doorway, where Konya had been silently watching the entire drama unfold. He quickly jumped out of the way and let the health minister storm out.

  As the hospital room returned to its normal ambient volume level (the patient, Lense was relieved to note, continued her sedated sleep undisturbed by the shouting match), Sue DiCamino took a step closer to Lense. “He’s tired. He didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, he did,” the Betazoid security officer muttered under his breath. Lense caught Kara McClay nodding in agreement out of the corner of her eye.

  “Yes, he did,” DiCamino admitted with a sigh. Then she lifted her head and looked Lense in the eye. “But for mercy’s sake, please ignore what he just said. We’ve never faced anything like this before, not in fifteen generations. We don’t know…none of this makes…she was fine, she was…” DiCamino was gesturing toward the woman in the bed, and Lense noticed the way her fingers were shaking. The woman was clearly exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally. “I’ve never frozen like that…Lana could’ve died, and I would have just stood here…”

  Lense stepped directly in front of the Mariposan doctor, grasped her now shaking shoulders firmly and gave what she hoped would be a reassuring squ
eeze. “I’m not going to walk away from this. It’s going to be all right,” Lense told her in her most authoritative voice.

  She only wished she could be as sure about the second part as she was determined about the first.

  Chapter

  5

  For a moment, Tev wondered if they had beamed down to the wrong planet. He and the rest of the da Vinci team—Gomez, Abramowitz, Corsi, and two additional security officers, Krotine and Robins—found themselves at the crossroads of two wheel-rutted dirt paths cutting through a wide expanse of farmland. The air smelled of fresh green growth, and from somewhere in the near distance, hidden by wide fields of quadrotriticale, came the sounds of children laughing, running, and playing without a care in the world. One would have never suspected a war had just been waged here, particularly not one fought with anything more advanced than rocks and pointed sticks.

  Gomez had her tricorder out, scanning the surrounding area. The furrowing of her brow inspired Tev to pull out his own device. “I’m picking up an incredible variety of exotic bacterial and viral microorganisms in the atmosphere.”

  “Trace remainders from the attacks?” Corsi asked.

  Tev snuffled dismissively. While he appreciated the security chief’s mindfulness of all potential threats, he found the attitude with which she approached this mission as overly paranoid. Even the most finely milled and aerosolized pathogenic agent would quickly disperse in an open rural area such as this, proving practically ineffectual. “These are just minor variants on common bacteria found in almost any M-class biosphere. Nothing we would even take note of under any other circumstances.”

  “But we are taking note of them now,” Gomez said, completely unnecessarily; they wouldn’t be having this interchange if they weren’t taking note. “They do, by and large, seem to indicate a significant degree of gen-engineering.”

  Tev decided it best to humor his superior officer, and adjusted his tricorder for finer detail. “Modifications would appear designed for more efficient nitrogen fixation, chemosynthesis, and biore-mediation in these crops—also not a remarkable find on any world with significantly advanced agricultural technology, Tellar and Earth included.” He snapped his tricorder shut to punctuate his point. “At any rate, these readings have now been transmitted to the da Vinci. Should, by some infinitesimal chance, any of these organisms prove detrimental to our health, the patterns are now available and accessible to the transporter biofilters.”

  As soon as he had put to rest any trepidation about microscopic attackers, however, they were surprised by a slightly larger assailant.

  “Aaaaah-boogala-booga-booga!!”

  If the small human boy was at all disappointed he had not evoked any fearful responses with his leap out of the tall grain stalks and his fierce cry, he didn’t show it. Instead, he simply stepped up right before Tev, craned his neck to meet the pair of black eyes nearly a meter and a half over his head, and said, “Hi! Are you a spaceman?”

  Tev considered the youngster for a moment, with his unruly thatch of red-orange hair, and a heavily-freckled face split nearly in half by a gap-toothed grin. His snout twitched in amusement as he replied, “And what would lead you to such a conclusion, young one?”

  “You look diff’rint. An’ your clothes.”

  Tev nodded thoughtfully, and squatted down on his haunches to bring himself closer to eye level with the boy. “Keen observations, sufficient for a preliminary hypothesis. But what about them?” he asked, gesturing to the rest of the team. “They do not look as different as I, but they wear the same clothes. Do you suspect they are from space as well?”

  The boy gave that a moment’s serious thought before nodding an affirmative response.

  “And why is that?” Tev prompted.

  “My mom said spacemen are comin’,” the boy answered. “I’m s’posed to bring ’em to her if I see ’em.”

  “Is your mother Prime Minister Odell?” Gomez interrupted, also crouching down beside him.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered, then added with great seriousness, “an’ she gets mad if you don’t come fast when she wants you to.”

  Tev straightened himself. “Well, then, we’d best avoid incurring her wrath.” The boy nodded in complete agreement, then spun and started running up the dusty trail. Without further prompting, the away team followed after him.

  Gomez fell in step at Tev’s left, smiling up at him in obvious amusement. “I had no idea you were so good with kids, Tev.”

  “Nor would you be expected to, Commander, as you’ve never had opportunity to witness me in the proximity of any children. As a point of fact, I always found it most rewarding, interacting with and helping to develop young, unformed minds.” After all, had things been different at Kharzh’ulla University, he would likely still be there teaching today…perhaps with several young ones of his own….

  “As opposed to the older, yet perpetually immature, minds you encounter on a day-to-day basis, right?” Gomez asked with what was apparently meant as a self-mocking grin.

  “Precisely,” Tev answered with a flat sigh.

  The boy rounded a corner that led them into a wide yard, populated by scores of fat poultry birds scratching and pecking at the dirt, as well as a dozen pygmy-sized black goats. A narrow path, marked by rows of stones on either side, split the yard in half and led up to a plain, low-built structure of some prefabricated building material. There were more young humans here, plus a few adults, performing a variety of chores: tossing seed to the birds, hanging wet clothing over a cable that stretched from one corner of the building to a pole in a far corner of the property, working strange wooden apparatuses the purpose of which Tev couldn’t even begin to guess.

  As he took all this in, their young guide had run up behind one of the women hanging clothing, and tugged vigorously on her skirts to gain her attention. She turned in the direction the youngster pointed, and set her face in a scowl.

  “Sweet mercy, what is this?” she demanded, loose strands of red-brown hair poking out from under her sun hat, flying behind her as she crossed the yard. “We haven’t had enough troubles with swaggering egoists and their private armies; y’ got t’ bring one of your own?”

  Tev could practically feel Corsi stiffening behind him in reaction to the woman’s aggressive welcome. Gomez, though, simply opened her hands out in a placating gesture as she took an extra step forward. “Apologies, Madam Prime Minister,” she said, “I assure you that we are only here to help, not to add to your difficulties.”

  “No, of course not,” she said with a deep frown. Judging from the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, the frown was her default facial expression. “Heaven forfend that Starfleet visit any troubles upon me and mine, Lord, no!”

  “For pity’s sake, Brenna,” called a voice from the farmhouse structure. Tev looked to see a gray man—plain, colorless clothing, receding white-gray hair, ashen skin, and a gray facial expression that betrayed utter weariness—standing in the doorway. “You called these people here; the least you could do is to hold your bile in check until after they’ve agreed to help us.”

  Odell answered him with a baleful glare, but said nothing. The gray man then turned to the away team, and flashed a practiced politician’s smile that came nowhere close to his eyes. “Welcome to the United Ficus Colony,” he said, raising his left arm in some sort of stiff ceremonial gesture. “I am Wilson Granger, Mariposan Prime Minister, and you’ve already met my Bringloidi counterpart and primary wife, Brenna Odell. Please, come inside.”

  They were ushered into the structure, which turned out to be a family residence, dominated by a large common room populated by even more children, from infancy to adolescence, along with their adult caregivers. Granger introduced them all, some as “secondary” or “tertiary” spouses of his or Odell’s, the rest only by name. Tev assumed the majority had gathered here for safety and comfort in the wake of the recent hostilities, and played no role in the United Ficus government. As the series of introducti
ons and obligatory small talk continued, he abandoned even the pretense of attention and turned to survey the rest of the structure.

  Beyond the common room was a kitchen/dining area, a long faux-wood table surrounded by a dozen chairs at its center. The far wall of the room was dominated by a stone hearth, a small fire burning beneath a large black metal pot. Tev recognized the scent of Terran chicken broth, a favorite dish of the captain’s. Against another wall was a tall iron pipe standing up through the floorboards and arching over the edge of a counter surface into a tin basin—a manual water pump, he determined with a glance.

  And in the near corner, in contrast to these archaic items, stood a gleaming apparatus of highly polished metallic cylinders, vats and pipes, reaching all the way to the roof beams. Tev gaped, surprised by the presence of this device, whatever it was, in these surroundings. He stepped closer, conducting an intense visual examination. A row of green lights blinked at him from a status screen, and the whole thing hummed benignly, like a well-fed grishnar cat.

  That benign impression was damaged, though, as Corsi entered the room behind him with her still-activated tricorder. Tev had never counted how many distinct sounds a Starfleet-issue tricorder was programmed to make, but he was willing to believe Corsi’s device emitted all of them at once. “My God,” she said, referring to the device, “that thing is a virtual cesspool!”

  Tev pulled out his own tricorder, and saw Corsi was again overreacting—there was no sign of waste material in the vessels. There was, however, an incredible plethora of microbial cultures being grown in each tank, multiplying at an accelerated rate, and excreting a variety of substances into the lower half of the cylinders. “Remarkable,” he said as he studied the readouts on the device’s operation. “Is this one of their biosynthesizing units you mentioned, Commander Gomez?”

  Gomez stepped between Tev and Gomez to consider the device. “Yes, it is,” she confirmed, an odd tone to her voice. “A smaller version of the ones I saw here eleven years ago, though.”