Death in Winter

by Michael Jan Freidman

  “Have you been waiting long?” asked the male in the black coat, uttering the words that confirmed his identity for her.

  “Not long at all,” Beverly responded, her voice roughened to the level of a Kevrata’s by another device, implanted in her throat. Now for the countersign. “How is your mother?”

  The male shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Fearful, like everyone these days. She sees those around her falling victim to the plague and wonders which of us will be next.”

  His voice was steady, unaffected. But neither he nor his companion could entirely conceal their desperation. Beverly had seen their expressions on a hundred different worlds. It said they would do anything, risk anything, sacrifice anything if it might translate into a cure.

  There were times in her career when she had felt bad bringing hope to such people, because hope was all she could bring. But this time she was confident she could do more than that.

  “So,” said the Kevrata in the blue-and-silver coat, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “do you think you can help us?”

  “I do,” Beverly said in the same barely audible tone. “But I’ll need a place to work. And blood samples. And a little time.”

  “We can provide a place and blood samples,” said Blue Coat. “Those will be easy. But time…” He tilted his head to one side. “That may be in short supply.”

  “I understand,” she said. Indeed, she understood that as well as anyone in existence, after what she had seen on Arvada III.

  “When can you start?” asked the Kevrata in the black coat.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. If you’ve got a place in mind, I can move in tonight. Otherwise—”

  Beverly stopped in midsentence, seeing a crinkling in the black skin around her companions’ eyes. It was a sign of apprehension. And they were looking at something directly behind the doctor.

  Beverly very much wanted to know what was going on back there. But she also didn’t want to attract attention, so she refrained from turning around.

  “Problem?” she asked softly.

  “Possibly,” the Kevrata in the black coat told her. “Sit still and perhaps it will go away.”

  Beverly did that. But as the seconds wore on, she could see by the lift of her companions’ chins that the problem wasn’t going away. It was getting closer.

  By then, everyone in the doctor’s part of the tavern was turning around. It would have seemed strange for her not to do so as well, so she swiveled about in her wooden chair—and saw that there was indeed a problem.

  A squad of armed Romulans had entered the tavern. There were six of them in all, the goggle-equipped hoods of their white thermal suits tossed back to reveal their brow ridges, the severe cut of their hair, and their tapered ears. It was impossible to mistake them for any other species—even the Vulcans, with whom they shared a long-ago common ancestry.

  “No one move,” said a hard but decidedly feminine voice.

  At first, Beverly couldn’t see where it had come from. Then the Romulans opened a path, and the doctor realized that there was a seventh figure in their group.

  She had expected to see the severe, dark features characteristic of most every Romulan she had ever encountered. The features she saw were neither severe nor dark.

  But they were hauntingly familiar.

  The piercing gaze, the strong but feminine features, the close-cropped blond hair, and the determined jut of her chin…if Beverly hadn’t known better, she would have said she was looking at her old comrade Tasha Yar, who was killed shortly after she became security chief on the Enterprise-D.

  But this was the Romulan Empire. That considered, it made much more sense that the woman giving orders in the tavern was Sela, the half-Romulan daughter of a Tasha Yar who had survived in a rogue timeline. Sela bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother and, with the exception of her pointed ears, almost none to her Romulan father—an ironic twist, considering the fact that she was entirely her father’s daughter under the surface.

  Sela had first reared her head more than a decade earlier as a player in the Klingon civil war—one whose support of the Duras faction nearly turned the tide against the newly established Chancellor Gowron. Thanks to an armada led by the Enterprise-D, Duras’s bid for power was crushed, and along with it Sela’s plan to manipulate the Klingons.

  The next time Sela turned up was on Romulus, where she was engineering an invasion of Vulcan under cover of a “reunification” initiative. Fortunately for Vulcan and the rest of the Federation, the scheme was stymied by Captain Picard, Data, and the legendary Ambassador Spock.

  Despite such setbacks, Sela was one of the craftiest and most dangerous individuals Crusher and her colleagues had ever encountered. If the woman was there in the tavern, it meant two things: first, that the Romulan praetor suspected Federation intervention on Kevratas and had dispatched Sela to deal with it; and second, that the Romulans had somehow gotten wind of Beverly’s meeting with the Kevrata.

  Sela looked around the tavern, her eyes like tiny, hungry predators. “There is an offworlder among you,” she barked. “Give him to me and none of you will be punished. Try to protect him and you will have occasion to regret it.”

  Him, Beverly thought. So she doesn’t know everything.

  No one in the tavern responded to Sela’s demand. But then, most of the Kevrata didn’t know of Beverly’s presence there.

  Sela looked around a moment more. Then she said, “Very well,” and trained her disruptor on a tavern patron at random.

  There was a flash of pale-green energy and the Kevrata went hurtling backward out of his chair. He was dead before he hit the floor, a plume of oily, dark smoke rising from a wet black hole in his chest.

  Sela’s voice cut through the sudden tide of fear and dismay. “The offworlder—now.”

  Beverly felt the weight of a hand on her forearm and turned to the Kevrata in the black coat. With his other hand, he was poking a furred thumb in the direction of the door by which he had entered. And his comrade’s fingers were inching inside his coat for something—a weapon, no doubt.

  They wanted her to go while they stayed and covered her escape. She hated the idea of accepting their offer, but what choice did she have? As the only person on Kevratas who could stop the plague, she had to do what she could to preserve herself.

  And that included letting others die so she could survive.

  Of course, there would be Romulan centurions posted outside the tavern—Beverly was certain of it. Otherwise, those who had entered with Sela would have moved immediately to block the exits.

  Taking a deep breath, she shot her companions a look of gratitude. Then she grasped the edge of the table, coiled, and launched herself over it.

  Her foot caught something as she shot between the two Kevrata, but it was only for a fraction of a second. Then she was bolting for the door, a green energy beam sizzling over her shoulder and striking the wall ahead of her.

  Beverly heard a cacophony of voices, and knew by the savage strobe of green light on the wall that her friends were returning the Romulans’ fire. But she didn’t stay in the tavern long enough to see the results. She swung the door open, taking a stinging blast of snow in the face, and lurched into the storm-choked street.

  At the same time, she pulled out the smuggled phaser concealed beneath her coat. Squinting against the stinging, white lash of the weather, she looked for a target—and didn’t find any.

  Suddenly Beverly caught something out of the corner of her eye. She whirled in time to see the flash of a green energy beam—but it shot past her, missing its target.

  She returned fire, her ruby phaser beam turning the snow the color of human blood. Then, her heart pumping, she pelted through the drifts in the opposite direction, hoping the storm would give her a chance to get away.

  The snow was deep in spots and Beverly’s boots were big, clumsy things, and she couldn’t help anticipating a disruptor bolt between her shoulder blades. But she
was in good shape and she had the urgency of fear driving her forward, and every plunging stride down the street took her farther from the prospect of danger.

  After a few minutes, she allowed herself to entertain the possibility that she had eluded Sela’s centurions. If that was so, she had to find shelter. She couldn’t go back to the inn where she had been staying—not if there was the slightest chance that Sela had tracked her there.

  Fortunately, this wasn’t the first clandestine mission the doctor had undertaken. She had known enough to take with her everything she brought to Kevratas, which wasn’t much at all.

  Glancing back over her shoulder, she reassured herself that there was no one in close pursuit. Then she slowed her progress to a measured jog. By then, her breath was coming in fiery gasps and freezing on the air like tortured wraiths, and her heart was pounding painfully against her ribs.

  But none of that mattered. She had gotten away from the tavern unscathed.

  Thank goodness, she thought. For a moment, she had been afraid that she would perish there in the cold and the snow, and never again see the people who mattered to her. She imagined how Wesley would have felt—and Jean-Luc as well—if she had died on this frozen, faraway world.

  The same way she had felt about Jack…

  Quickly, Beverly thrust the image away from her. She wasn’t safe from Sela’s centurions yet—not completely. The last thing she needed was a distraction.

  I’m still alive, she thought. But I’ll need a little luck to stay that way.

  It was then she heard something to her right—or thought she had. A voice? Or was it just the wailing of the wind? She whirled to see, her phaser held out in front of her.

  But there was nothing there—just the vague, hulking outline of a building. Beverly felt a wave of relief.

  Then she heard something else, from a different direction entirely. And this time, when she turned to investigate, she saw something loom out of the storm—something that looked altogether too much like a Romulan thermal suit.

  Beverly squeezed off a phaser blast, digging a red tunnel into the falling snow. Then she started running again, hoping to elude the Romulans as she had before.

  It was harder this time. The air had begun to tear the lining of her throat, and her legs were becoming more leaden with each stride, and her coat was a heavy, stifling burden. But she forced herself to ignore it all.

  The Kevrata need me, the doctor told herself. I can’t let them down.

  She had barely completed the thought when something ripped into her shoulder, spinning her and dropping her into a drift. As she lay there, stunned, her shoulder raged as if it were on fire.

  A disruptor bolt, she thought. If it had hit her more squarely, it would have killed her.

  Through sheets of silent, falling snow, she saw man-sized shapes advancing on her. It occurred to her to fire back at them, but the disruptor bolt seemed to have knocked the phaser out of her hand, and her arm was numb from the shoulder down anyway.

  Beverly wrenched herself about and got to her feet, despite the agony it cost her. Cradling her arm with her opposite hand, she tried to get away, to find a hiding place. But it was no use. The pain in her shoulder was too great and the energy blast had taken too much out of her.

  Before long, she noticed a third thing working against her. Without realizing it, she had run into a cul-de-sac formed by three shadowy walls.

  Turning, Beverly saw the Romulans had filled the mouth of the dead end, their weapons leveled at her. But they didn’t fire. They just stood there, waiting for something.

  Or some one.

  Beverly was cold all of a sudden, so cold she couldn’t stand it. Her body began to shiver, coat or no coat. I’m going into shock, she thought.

  Then she saw a figure move through the rank of centurions and stop a couple of meters in front of her. It was Sela. Beverly could see enough of the woman’s face to be sure of that.

  Raising her weapon, Sela trained it on her captive. She didn’t bother to see who might be lurking beneath the Kevratan hood. She just smiled and squeezed the trigger.

  Closing her eyes, Beverly said a silent good-bye to Wesley and Jean-Luc. It looked like they would be learning of her death after all, as much as it hurt her to think so.

  Then, at point-blank range, she felt the splintering impact of Sela’s disruptor beam.

  2

  “TEA,” PICARD SAID OPTIMISTICALLY. “EARL GREY. HOT.”

  He watched with interest as something took shape in his replicator’s alcove. It took a while, but it finally manifested itself as a cup and saucer. Ah, the captain thought with a feeling of satisfaction, now we are getting somewhere.

  The day before, his request had produced the required beverage sans cup—which made for rather a mess. This was progress. He made a mental note to thank Chief Heyer, who had assumed the responsibility of getting all the replicators into working order.

  Removing the simple white china from the alcove, Picard watched the steam rise lazily, even sensuously from his cup. Then he brought it to his lips and took a sip.

  And regretted it.

  Had the carpet not been laid so recently, he might have spit out what was in his mouth—that was how vile it tasted. As it was, he took pains to return the liquid to the cup whence it came, and then—with a shiver—returned the cup to the replicator.

  Progress, perhaps. But it was far from a fait accompli.

  Just then, he heard the voice of his chief engineer over the ship’s intercom. “Captain,” he said, “this is La Forge. There’s a communication for you from Starfleet Command.”

  Picard smiled, his experience with the tea forgotten. “Are you also our com officer now, Mister La Forge?”

  The engineer chuckled. “Whatever it takes, sir.”

  The captain had always admired that attitude in Geordi. “By all means, Commander, put it through.”

  Sitting down at his desk, he watched as the Federation graphic was replaced with another image—that of Admiral Edrich, the gray-haired elder statesman of Starfleet Command. Picard hadn’t met the man until after he took command of the Enterprise-D, but he had taken a liking to Edrich instantly.

  “Admiral,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Edrich frowned, accentuating the wrinkles around his mouth. “I’m afraid I have bad news, Jean-Luc.”

  Picard recalled a time when he had heard a similar remark, albeit from a different admiral. However, he had never expected the news to be that bad. To lose his brother, his sister-in-law, and his beloved nephew all at once…it had almost broken his heart for good.

  The captain cringed a little, wondering what the news would be on this occasion. Not as devastating as that other time, certainly. It couldn’t be.

  Then Edrich said, “It’s Beverly Crusher. She’s been declared missing in action.”

  Picard found himself shaking his head, unable to wrap his mind around the information. “Missing…?” he repeated numbly.

  “The likelihood,” the admiral said softly but unrelentingly, “is that she’s been killed.”

  It has to be a mistake. The captain said as much. “How could Beverly be missing when she’s back at Starfleet Medical?”

  Edrich sighed. “She left Starfleet Medical a week ago, Jean-Luc, on a covert mission. Top clearance only.”

  How is that possible? Picard had spoken to her only…he counted the days. Has it been an entire week already? “Where did she—” Feeling his throat begin to constrict, he paused to get himself under control. “Where was Doctor Crusher sent?”

  “A world called Kevratas,” said the admiral, “on the edge of the Romulan Empire. An epidemic is ravaging the native population. Doctor Crusher had experience with it a long time ago, on Arvada Three. We hoped she would be able to develop a vaccine.”

  Picard remembered Beverly telling him about Arvada III. She had been but a girl, helping to treat the victims of a crash—not only for their injuries, but also for a virus they seemed to ha
ve brought with them.

  And she had developed a vaccine—for Federation member species, at least. He remembered her flush of triumph when she told him about it from her office at Starfleet Medical. And that, he admitted grudgingly, made her the perfect candidate to find a cure for the epidemic on Kevratas.

  “Of course,” said Edrich, “this was more than a humanitarian gesture. As you know, the Empire has been in disarray since Shinzon destroyed the greater part of the Romulans’ leadership. Some of their outworlds have taken advantage of the situation to reach out to the Federation. Kevratas is one of them.”

  And Kevratas isn’t just a single planet, Picard noted. It was the homeworld of the entire Kevratan species, which had established itself on a dozen previously unoccupied planets before the Romulans conquered them all and took control.

  The other Kevratan worlds took their cue from Kevratas. If the Federation could gain Kevratas’s trust, the effect would spread among the outworlds like wildfire.

  “You understand the implications,” said Edrich, “I’m sure. The praetor may have sent out feelers, extending the promise of improved relations. But this is a bird in the hand—a chance to take the Empire down a peg and liberate the outworlds at the same time. It’s of the utmost importance that we jump on this while the opportunity presents itself. If it weren’t, we would never have sent the head of Starfleet Medical.”

  “Why,” Picard asked, “are you so quick to assume that Doctor Crusher is dead?”

  The admiral looked apologetic. “We haven’t heard from her or the Kevrata who were supposed to help her for three days now. Seldom do operatives remain missing that long and turn up alive. You know that as well as I do.”

  Seldom, the captain echoed stubbornly in the privacy of his mind, but not never. There was still a chance, no matter how slim, that Beverly had survived.

  “I wish I could be more sanguine,” said Edrich. “Unfortunately, those are the facts.”

  Picard shook his head. “No.”

  The admiral regarded him, his eyes full of sympathy. “I know how hard this must be for you.”