Bloodthirst

by J. M. Dillard

  McCoy stopped breathing. He stepped next to Chris’ unit and stood there until he got up the nerve to open it.

  She was enveloped from head to foot by the stasis field; its soft blue light gave her a distinctly ethereal beauty. Trembling, McCoy switched the unit off. The field melted away. Under normal lighting, Christine looked very much alive.

  He picked up the tricorder that dangled by a strap from his neck and calibrated it to do life function readings. He directed it at Christine.

  Nothing.

  It was not unexpected. Remembering something he had studied long ago in a now-forgotten zoology class, McCoy leaned over the unit and, with one eye on the tricorder, screamed into Chris’ ear.

  “CHRISTINE!”

  The tricorder gave a small bleep as it registered brain function. Chris was alive.

  Sobbing with joy, McCoy buried his face in her shoulder.

  Quince Waverleigh was dead, and Jim Kirk was to blame. At least, that was the way Jim saw it. It had been a bad afternoon, and an even worse night. For the past several hours, he had been staring at the expanse of white ceiling above his bunk.

  Getting too hot to breathe.

  He could have forgiven Quince if it were all just another one of his practical jokes. But he could not forgive him for dying.

  Nor could he forgive himself.

  If only I hadn’t been so stupid. Mendez must have been waiting to see if I were going to follow up on any suspicions.

  If only I’d sent the first message on a public channel and to Quince’s apartment

  The rational part of his brain knew that if Mendez wanted to monitor transmissions to and from the Enterprise, there was nothing he could have done to prevent Mendez from finding out.

  Then why did you have to call Quince? You should have suspected you were marking him for death.

  Because he trusted Quince, that was why. And at the same time, he had no idea what was at stake. Would it really have been any better if it’d been someone else?

  Yes. If it’d been me

  He decided to get up and start his duty shift three hours early. He pushed himself to a sitting position and swung his legs around. He felt stiff, as if he had grown very old in those few hours of lying still. It would be good for him, would force him to function, albeit in a haze of suppressed pain. The grief had begun to funnel itself into a stronger, darker emotion: revenge.

  He rose and dressed himself. He could no longer see Mendez as the grief-stricken father. That perception was gone, replaced by that of Mendez, the cold-blooded killer. Whatever personal tragedy the man had undergone did not give him the right to inflict the same on others.

  At the same time, fully aware of the contradiction, Jim wanted Mendez dead. Part of his bitterness stemmed from the knowledge that he would never bring himself to fulfill that desire. Still, he was going to bring Mendez and his associates down.

  The question was, how?

  There was time. Mendez might be plotting to silence Kirk even now, but wiping out a starship like the Enterprise would take considerable planning. There was time to get even.

  And revenge is a dish best served cold

  Jim glanced into the mirror over the dresser and tried to smooth the angry grief from his face before heading for the bridge.

  At the navigation console, Lieutenant Sulu suppressed a yawn. Anything that suggested relaxation would have been out of place; since the announcement of Chapel’s death, the bridge had been a tense, unhappy place.

  Even more so today. The captain had already been on duty when Sulu got there—fifteen minutes early—sitting in the conn with a stern, forbidding scowl on his face. Gods knew, they were all upset about losing Christine, but Sulu’s instinct told him that the captain had suffered an even greater loss.

  And so the day-shift bridge crew reported one by one for duty, murmuring hushed greetings to those they replaced. As if we were at someone’s funeral, Sulu thought. He sneaked a sideways glance at Chekov, but the navigator stared somberly ahead at the viewscreen full of stars.

  This is going to be an awfully long day. Sulu sighed and glanced down at his panel. Everything normal, everything as it should be. Except that Christine was dead and something was eating the captain alive

  The bridge was so hushed that when the captain’s intercom whistled, Sulu gave a start. He didn’t intend to eavesdrop on the conversation; after all, it was none of his business. But the bridge was so quiet, it was impossible not to overhear. He could tell from the way Chekov tensed next to him that the Russian was listening, too.

  Kirk punched the intercom with his fist and grunted into it.” Kirk here.”

  “McCoy here. Jim, you’re not going to believe this.” McCoy’s voice was trembling with such strong emotion that Sulu could not tell if it was grief or joy.

  “Try me,” Kirk said dully.

  “Ensign Stanger attacked Lieutenant Tomson early this morning.”

  Kirk sat up very straight in his chair. His voice became more animated. “Stanger is dead, Doctor. Is this your idea of some sort of bad joke?”

  “Stanger isn’t dead,” McCoy said, with maniacal good cheer. “Neither is Chris.”

  Christine was alive? Sulu no longer pretended not to be listening. A broad smile on his Asian features, he swiveled in his chair to face the captain. So did Chekov. So did Uhura. Even Spock glanced up from his viewer.

  “It’s true, Jim,” McCoy raved on. “It only makes sense. We knew it was genetically engineered. It’s a smart virus. It does whatever’s necessary to keep the host alive for as long as it can. Adams probably never even remembered! Of course he didn’t tell us! How were we supposed to know? It was hibernation, Jim. I should have guessed from the very beginning. I guess I subconsciously knew all along.”

  The captain’s frown faded somewhat. “Doctor, you’re babbling.”

  “Babbling?” McCoy laughed. “Babbling! You’re damn right I’m babbling! And I intend to babble the rest of the day.”

  Kirk gave a small smile. “Why don’t I come down and see if we can figure out what you’re trying to tell me?”

  McCoy cackled. “You do that, Jim. You just do that! McCoy out.”

  Kirk stood up, his mood apparently somewhat improved. “Mr. Spock if you would accompany me to sickbay.”

  The Vulcan turned to look at him, the barest ghost of a questioning look crossing his face and then disappearing. “Yes, Captain.”

  “I need someone to protect me from Dr. McCoy,” Kirk said, as if an explanation were expected. “Mr. Sulu, you have the conn.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sulu answered, already routing it through to his own station at the helm. Odd, for the captain to ask Spock to go with him. There was no need Sulu could see to have the Vulcan along but then, command had its privileges. And it would give those on the bridge the opportunity to talk freely.

  The turbolift doors closed over the captain and his first officer.

  “Christine’s alive!” Uhura exclaimed, and everyone laughed delightedly and began talking at once.

  “But what ?”

  “How could it be ?”

  “Maybe she’s not really alive,” Chekov intoned solemnly. “Maybe she’s just come back from the dead.”

  “Don’t be morbid,” Uhura scolded him. “Dr. McCoy said something about hibernation.”

  “I’m happy for Christine,” Chekov said. “But the other—Stanger. McCoy said he attacked Lieutenant Tomson.” His lips curved in a wicked smile. “And I know what he was looking for.”

  Sulu snickered. “In Lieutenant Tomson? You must be kidding.”

  “Not that. “Chekov looked vaguely disgusted. “Don’t you remember what I told you?” His voice took on an exaggeratedly dramatic tone. “The wampire comes back from the dead to drink the blood of the living.”

  Uhura sounded insulted. “How can you tease about something like that, especially after we thought Chris had died? Why can’t you just let us be happy?”

  “Who’s teasing?” Chekov s
aid, but he turned back to his station and smiled. “At least, I have protection. At least, I don’t have to worry while Stanger and Adams are free to attack innocent wictims.”

  “The only wictim around here"“ Uhura’s brown eyes narrowed—is going to be you if you don’t”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Sulu soothed. “He’s just teasing because he’s embarrassed to admit how happy he is about Christine.”

  But he found himself wondering if Pavel had an extra crucifix.…

  In sickbay, McCoy clutched the lab report on Chris Chapel to him like a coveted trophy and beamed broadly at Kirk. Kirk forced a weak grin. He was happy for McCoy, for Chapel, for Stanger, for the fact that he had not after all lost two crewmembers. But he didn’t feel much like smiling. Quince Waverleigh was still dead, and there was no chance of bringing him back to life.

  But McCoy seemed too wrapped up in his own joy to notice the captain’s reticence. “I should have run blood tests before declaring them dead!” he said raptly, without any sort of introductory remarks. “The serum magnesium levels in their blood would have tipped me off right away.”

  “Doctor,” Spock said in his deep, quiet voice, “perhaps it would be less confusing if you began at the beginning.”

  “Oh. Well, it seems our smart virus is really smart, all right. I’m running tests on both Stanger and Chris right now. Chris is still unconscious, though she seems to be coming out of it. Her brain tissue is saturated with a hypothalamic neurosecretion, remarkably similar to a chemical normally found in hibernating mammals. Think of it, Jim! The virus works to keep itself and its host alive by causing the human host to hibernate.”

  Kirk frowned. “But if they were hibernating, why didn’t they show any brain waves? I thought”

  McCoy interrupted gleefully. “That’s just it, Jim! In some hibernating animals, brain waves slow to virtually nil, with maybe one barely measurable burst of activity every twenty-four hours or so. Of course, a strong stimulus—a loud noise, say—would cause measurable cortical activity. But the problem with Stanger and Chris was, once brain function appeared to cease, I turned the monitors off. If I’d just left them on for several hours”

  “I still don’t understand,” Kirk said. “Why did the virus cause hibernation in the first place?”

  “Okay. Um the virus is like a parasite. A symbiotic one. In other words, it keeps the host alive for as long as possible so that the virus can multiply in the host’s body as much as possible. This also allows the host to infect more people with the virus.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One thing we’d already known about the virus is that it requires heme—that’s the iron compound in hemoglobin—to reproduce. Now, every time we’re active we use up our stores of hemoglobin in the blood.”

  “That’s fourth-grade biology,” Kirk said. “Go on.”

  “Sorry. The results haven’t come back yet, but here’s my guess: when the host’s heme levels are high, the virus shuts the body down via hibernation. More heme for it, you understand, if the host is motionless. The more it can reproduce within the host’s body.”

  “But Adams didn’t go through a coma,” Kirk protested.

  “We don’t know that. Maybe he did, before he sent the distress signal, before his heme stores became depleted. Maybe he killed Yoshi and Lara because his heme levels dropped.”

  “But you just said he was in a coma.”

  “Hibernation, actually. Two very different states. Anyway, maybe what brings the host out of hibernation is the heme level dropping too low. The virus wants survival, so it wakens the host to go and search for more heme.”

  “By killing someone else and drinking their blood,” Kirk said distastefully.

  “But drinking it would not have the same effect as getting a transfusion,” Spock pointed out.

  “Well, you’re right there, Spock. “McCoy was still cheerfully smiling, as if too happy to be aware of the gruesome turn the conversation had taken. “That’s a strange little side effect, that craving for blood a type of pica, an abnormal craving, caused by the anemia. I suppose that if the host is too stupid to figure out that just drinking blood won’t help him, then he’ll go the way of the elephant. Sure, it would raise his iron stores some, and help in the production of hemoglobin, but not at all like a transfusion would.”

  “And someone,” Kirk said heavily, not wanting to believe the obvious, “Adams, perhaps, designed this virus to do what it does?”

  McCoy stopped smiling and nodded.

  “Elegantly insidious,” Spock said. “The work of a darkly creative mind. The virus promotes its spread by driving the victim to search for heme. Thus more victims are infected. The craving ensures the necessary physical contact to spread the disease.”

  McCoy nodded. “As in Adams’ case, there is some dementia. The pica tends to cause bursts of irrationality. But personality seems to be a factor.”

  He’s hoping that because of Chapel, Kirk told himself.

  “Tomson said Stanger seemed to be fighting the urge to harm her,” the doctor continued. “Obviously, he’s in need of another transfusion. We need to find him soon. Without a transfusion, the disease is ultimately fatal.”

  “Then Adams could be dead by now,” Kirk said.

  McCoy’s expression soured. “Adams seems to be taking care of himself all right. Stanger got the disease because Adams was transfusing blood from him.”

  “How could he get away with that?” Kirk was puzzled.

  “Beats me.” McCoy shrugged. “I figured he must have overridden the cabin locks somehow. I asked Tomson to look into it. She said if that’s how Adams did it, Stanger will be his first and last victim.”

  “Now that Stanger is infected, Adams will no doubt seek healthier prey,” Spock added. “But I think it extremely unlikely that Adams overrode the lock. Very few people possess the ability and the security clearance”

  “And I’m sure you’re one of them,” the doctor interrupted. “But the fact exists that Stanger was infected.”

  Kirk ran a hand over his forehead as he strained to remember. “Wait a minute. He could have done it. Waverleigh said something about his being a computer expert.”

  “There you go. I just outlogicked Spock.” McCoy smiled sweetly. In spite of the seriousness of the conversation, it seemed hard for him to control his elation about Chapel. Kirk wanted to smile, but found it still too difficult.

  Spock sighed and gazed briefly heavenward, as if he were going to roll his eyes but, on reflection, considered the gesture beneath his dignity. He did not reply to McCoy. “Will there be anything else, Captain?”

  “As a matter of fact” Kirk stopped. His guilt over Quince’s death made the matter too painful to go into, but he had to force himself. If you want to get Mendez…

  Some of the happiness faded from McCoy’s watery blue eyes, replaced by a look of somber curiosity. “Something’s eating at you, isn’t it, Jim?”

  Spock waited. The Vulcan had probably known all along, and simply bided his time until Jim could bring himself to talk about it.

  Jim took a deep breath. “You know that I contacted Admiral Waverleigh at Starfleet and asked him to check into the matter about Mendez.”

  “My God.” McCoy leaned forward. “He came up with something, didn’t he?”

  “He sent me a message,” Jim said. He wished he had been able to forget it, but he had thought it through a thousand times in the past day, analyzing each word. He repeated it for them.

  Spock said nothing, but McCoy’s expression was skeptical. “I’ve heard you talk about Quince, Jim. You sure he isn’t just pulling your leg?” He looked at Spock. “Quince Waverleigh has a bit of a reputation as a joker.”

  Spock digested the information without comment; his eyes were watching Jim, as if he already knew what the captain was going to say next.

  “Bones” Jim began helplessly, and broke off. He tried to just say the words, and ignore the image he knew would come with them: Quince’s skim
mer breaking up as it impacted with San Francisco Bay It came out harsh and bitter. “Quince Waverleigh is dead.”

  Spock’s expression did not change.

  “Dear God.” McCoy blanched. “Jim when did this happen?”

  “Yesterday. His skimmer went into the bay.” It was out. Jim took a deep breath to steady himself. The rest would be easy “Gentlemen, Quince was my friend. I would appreciate some unbiased interpretation of these events.”

  “I don’t know if I’m unbiased,” McCoy said. “I knew Waverleigh, though not all that well. Better to say I knew of him, I suppose. But it seems very obvious to me that there’s a direct connection between the message and his death. I hate to say it, but Adams must have been telling the truth.”

  “Spock?” Jim asked softly. He valued McCoy’s opinion, but it was the Vulcan’s he was really waiting to hear. “That’s why I brought you along.”

  Spock nodded somberly. “I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. McCoy.”

  “You think Mendez had him killed?” Kirk asked.

  “Likely. And if not Mendez, then someone else put at risk by the investigation.” Spock paused. “But Captain, it is likely that Mendez is by now aware that you were in touch with Admiral Waverleigh. And certainly he knows that you will attempt to avenge the admiral’s death.”

  Elegantly put, Kirk thought. That’s exactly what I intend to do—avenge Quince’s death.

  “I don’t like where this is heading,” McCoy muttered.

  Spock continued, ignoring him. “It is only a matter of time before Mendez decides to silence you. Or better, if he could arrange it, to discredit you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Kirk said slowly. “My main concern is protecting the Enterprise.” Bad enough that I’ve killed Quince

  “I would be surprised,” Spock said, “if Mendez has not already acted. The sooner you are silenced, the better.”

  “Mendez would like to have me out of the picture, of course,” Kirk said. “But not necessarily at the cost of his own skin. Let’s not forget that it’s more than a little difficult to blow a starship out of existence without explaining why. I doubt Mendez has the power to commandeer another starship to attack the Enterprise.”