“Funny that you’re not tipping over from this infection,” Ganik said.
“I’ve had a lot more experience than you have in coping with illnesses. Now, do I have your authorization to order the crew down to the surface?”
The albino’s white face seemed to bifurcate as Ganik’s vision began to blur. Reluctantly, the Orion came to a decision. “All right, Qagh. Go ahead and get started. I’ll be in my quarters.”
Qagh nodded. “Will you be coming down in the landing shuttle, or do you want to use the transporter?”
“Neither,” Ganik said. “I’m staying aboard.”
“That might not be the smartest decision you’ve ever made,” Qagh said as he moved toward the door, clearly intent on carrying out his new orders.
Leaving the ship unattended seems even less smart, Ganik thought. “We’ll see.”
Qagh paused in the open hatchway and looked back in Ganik’s direction, a calculating smile splitting his countenance. “Even after all we’ve been through together, Ganik, I still get the feeling that you don’t entirely trust me.”
How perceptive of you, Ganik thought.
“But it’s your call,” the albino added, smiling. “You are the captain, after all.”
It sounded as if he muttered something else as he turned away, but Ganik couldn’t be sure.
• • •
A pair of faces gradually resolved themselves from the swirling maelstrom of Ganik’s delirium.
One of the faces was as white as Orion’s north polar cap.
“I thought you left the ship, Qagh,” Ganik said, confused. He struggled into a half-sitting position, and noticed only then that he was stripped to the waist, in his own bed in the berth that had formerly belonged to D’Jinnea.
He couldn’t quite remember how he’d gotten back here.
“I left the ship yesterday,” said the albino. “I decided to come back aboard after you stopped answering the comm.”
Ganik turned toward the other face that hovered nearby, which he saw belonged to Golag. “Where is the rest of the crew?”
“They’re still down on the planet, recovering,” Golag said. “Qagh still insists that we all might have died from the infection had you not sent us to the surface.” Though Ganik was still disoriented, he immediately recognized the sound of the gunnery specialist’s skepticism.
“Half the crew already seems to be back to normal,” Qagh said, apparently unfazed by his colleague’s unconcealed doubts. “Golag was the first to get back on his feet, if you can believe that. The rest of the men will be back on board shortly.”
Good thing I stayed on the ship, Ganik thought. He still had no concrete reason to believe that the second trip down to Qav’loS had really been necessary. And he wouldn’t put it past Qagh to try to usurp command of the Jade Lady, her crew, and the various ongoing criminal enterprises that Ganik had inherited from his late predecessor, D’Jinnea.
The thought that he might have just thwarted the albino’s plan to do to him what they had both done to D’Jinnea pleased him greatly.
Qagh turned toward Golag and said, “Do you mind if I speak with the captain in private for a moment?”
Golag frowned, then looked toward Ganik for guidance. The Orion nodded his assent; despite his weakened condition, he knew that Qagh wouldn’t dare raise a hand against him with Golag standing right outside the door to his quarters.
Golag exited the room after delivering a parting shrug.
After the hatch had closed, Qagh sat on a plain, functional chair that was near the foot of the bed. “You still don’t trust me, Ganik.” He paused. “Well, I can’t say I blame you.”
Ganik nodded. “You have to admit, curing this little plague of yours could have given you a convenient means of . . . taking over.”
“If you had left the ship with everybody else, you mean,” Qagh said, picking up and activating a handheld medical scanner that he must have been carrying all along. He smiled. “But it looks like you were too smart for me, Ganik. And you’re right. I haven’t been entirely candid with you about the return trip to Qav’loS.”
The Orion’s eyebrows went aloft unbidden. He couldn’t believe the little albino would admit to scheming against him.
Unless he believed he’d already succeeded.
“What are you talking about, Qagh?” Ganik said, his voice rasping in a throat that had suddenly gone dry.
The white-faced Klingon looked down at his scanner, whose readout wasn’t visible to Ganik. The younger man’s smile expanded. “I told you that the planet’s environment would probably help cure the illness, Ganik. But I’m afraid I left out one important detail.”
Ganik found that he could no longer speak. His mouth was as parched as Tyree’s deserts. He wanted to rise to get a glass of water, but his limbs suddenly felt like they’d been hewn from granite. His heart raced, as though it were trying to break the warp barrier.
Qagh fixed his gaze back upon Ganik, his smile twisting into a rictus of pure malice.
“I neglected to tell you,” Qagh continued, “that I paid good money to one of my biotechnology sources to learn that this disease organism is always fatal — unless the infected person remains on the planet for a few kilaans after exposure, to build up an immunity. But you opted to guard the ship instead of taking the only cure. It appears, Captain, that caution has killed you.”
Ganik’s breath was coming in painful rasps. Lightning coursed through his limbs. In spite of his agony, he somehow found his voice again.
“Why, Qagh? You were . . . like a son to me.”
The albino sneered. “You and D’Jinnea have exploited me all my life. I was your slave. An ugly weakling you tolerated only because I developed expertise that made money for you both — and because of where I must have come from.”
Qagh reached into his tunic and pulled a small metal object from an inner pocket. Though his delirium was rapidly returning, threatening to swallow the universe whole beginning with the edges of the room, Ganik recognized the object immediately.
It was the clasp that had once kept Qagh’s baby blankets in place, when the albino had been a half-dead foundling. The clasp bore the family crest of the House of Ngoj, the once-powerful Klingon family from which Ganik and D’Jinnea had always assumed Qagh had come. Though that family had suffered many reversals over the years — Ganik had heard that revelations about some sort of genetic scandal some three decades earlier had brought the House low — the House of Ngoj had been returning to ascendancy of late. Ganik and D’Jinnea had both hoped that their albino charge would help them leverage some of that House’s wealth and power someday.
Now Ganik knew that day was never going to come. He tried to scream, but his breath failed him.
Then delirium took hold of his mind, even as blackness came creeping in at the edges of his vision.
• • •
The hatch hissed open, startling Golag. “Get in here! Hurry!”
Golag had been leaning idly against the sealed hatch, alert for an emergency summons from Captain Ganik. He was mildly surprised to note that the voice that called him belonged instead to Qagh.
He wasted no time getting back inside the berth where the captain had been recuperating from his illness.
And where he now lay on his bed, ashen-faced and breathing in brief, wheezing gasps.
“What’s happened to him?” Golag asked the little albino, who was standing beside Ganik’s bed and slowly moving a scanning device over the stricken man’s chest.
“It seems to have come over him suddenly,” Qagh said.
“What has come over him?” Golag reached toward the knife at his belt, then paused, realizing he would be raising his hand against the Jade Lady’s legitimate captain if it turned out Ganik was succumbing to illness rather than assassination.
“The end of the disease process,” Qagh said. “I wish he had heeded my warning and returned to Qav’loS, even for a short time. He might have recovered by now.”
&nbs
p; “You said anyone who refused to go down to Qav’loS might come to a bad end,” Golag said. “But you never proved it.”
Qagh favored the gunnery man with a knowing nod. “Ah, yes. You were one of the skeptics. But at least you were wise enough to go to the planet, even without proof.”
Golag nodded. “There’s no point in taking unnecessary chances.”
“Of course not. Especially not when your captain felt compelled to take those unnecessary chances for you.”
Ganik’s body suddenly began to convulse. The captain’s huge, gray-mottled arms flailed, sending a bedside table and several drinking vessels crashing into a bulkhead as both Qagh and Golag ducked out of the way.
The albino gestured toward Ganik. “I fear you now have the proof you wanted about what the Qav’loS virus can do if left unchecked.”
Ganik shuddered and stopped moving, his pleading, rheumy eyes locking on Golag’s. Though he was clearly unable to speak, he nevertheless seemed desperate to say something.
Golag’s spine was flash-frozen with renewed apprehension about the albino. Was Ganik trying to tell him that Qagh had poisoned him? Or was he simply experiencing whatever terrors bedeviled Orions when the Fek’lhr finally came calling?
While Golag knew he would never know the answer to the latter question, he could see that this death matched no poison he had ever seen. As he watched with horrified fascination, Ganik’s body seemed to desiccate and deflate, like a pile of dry leaves consumed by fire. The thick, ropy muscles of his forearms shrank and retreated, and his skin became thoroughly gray, turning hard and crystalline.
A final staccato shriek of horror and agony escaped Ganik’s petrified lips an instant before what remained of the Orion pirate lord collapsed into a pile amounting to a few large handfuls of mineralized, blue-gray powder.
“A pity,” Qagh said distractedly, waving his scanner over Captain Ganik’s mortal remains with a dispassion that would have done a Vulcan proud.
The albino turned off the scanner, then looked directly at Golag.
“Well, Golag. It appears I will be the one setting the agenda from now on. And planning the raids. And allocating the money.”
Golag was too stunned by what he had just seen to do anything but nod.
He tried very hard not to think about the fate of anyone who got in the albino’s way now.
SIX
Stardate 8992.8 (Late 2289)
U.S.S. Excelsior
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, Commander,” said Dr. Klass, gazing at Sulu from across the top of one of her biobed monitors. “But you look like hell.”
“No offense taken, Doc,” Sulu said through a thin smile. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I suppose it shows more than I realized.”
Standing beside her primary workspace in the sickbay’s main science lab, Klass watched him with that same sincere I’m-listening-very-closely expression that Sulu had seen crease the faces of many of Starfleet’s best physicians over the past quarter century.
After appraising him in silence for several moments, she said, “Maybe watching that woman die right in front of you yesterday affected you a bit more than you know.”
He sighed, wishing, just this once, that she wasn’t so damned perceptive. But he also couldn’t deny that her gift of perspicacity was the main reason that Excelsior’s chief medical officer had become such a close friend and confidante during his first few difficult weeks serving as Captain Styles’s executive officer and second-in-command.
But despite his feelings of friendship for the doctor, he decided not to mention last night’s return of his intermittently recurring dreams — at least not before he’d spent a little more time pondering the question of why a pale-visaged ghost he’d seen only once more than four decades ago had chosen last night to pay him one of its rare visits.
“It isn’t every day you see someone die the way that poor woman did,” he said at length, recalling the horror of watching a living being suddenly collapse into a few handfuls of vaguely crystalline residue. “Have you identified whatever it was that killed her?”
Klass released a frustrated sigh and shook her head. “I’m still running analytical comparisons, using all the data I scanned during my sleepless night from the tissue samples you beamed up. All I can say so far is that your initial impression may be on the right track: I can’t rule out this thing being a strain of the Omega IV pathogen.”
Moving with a supple grace that belied her apparent age, the gray-haired doctor approached the computer terminal that sat atop her desk and tapped its slender keypad. An image of a greenish, globular-shaped microorganism, magnified many thousands of times, appeared on the screen.
“The virus you found on Galdonterre still hasn’t given up all its secrets,” Klass continued. “But at least I finally managed to persuade the captain that it isn’t casually communicable.”
“Speaking on behalf of myself and everyone who was with me on Galdonterre,” Sulu said, chuckling although the night he’d spent in quarantine had passed very slowly indeed, “you have our undying gratitude for that.”
Klass cast a grin in Sulu’s direction before turning back toward the screen. “I’m sure I could spend the rest of my life studying this virus before I get all the way to the bottom of it. But there are a few things I’ve been able to determine right off the bat.”
Sensing that Klass was quickly shifting into lecture mode, Sulu folded his arms before himself and leaned against one of the examination tables. “Such as?”
“First, it’s obvious to me that this is a deliberately tailored pathogen. And a computerized cross-comparison to known ‘wild’ strains with similar molecular markers revealed that the original biochemical substrate the genetic designer used is an extremely rare and potent retroviral form of the Levodian flu. Fortunately, it isn’t an airborne strain like the original Levodian flu virus, or the Omega IV pathogen. So at least the captain won’t have to try to enforce a general quarantine around Galdonterre.”
“That’s something to be thankful for,” Sulu said, relieved at the news. “But are you sure about the Levodian flu connection? I had a bad bout of it as a child, but it didn’t turn me into pile of rock salt.”
“Of course not. Levodian flu is generally harmless to most humanoid species, especially once the fever, chills, and sniffles run their course.” Klass tapped a control on the terminal’s keypad, and the magnified image gave way to a schematic diagram of a familiar yet alien double-helix DNA spiral. “Needless to say, there’s a lot more folded into this bug’s genome than the baseline Levodian flu virus that might have kept you out of school for a day or two. My cross-checks with some generous and discreet friends at Starfleet Medical and Starfleet Intelligence have confirmed the presence of Klingon DNA — along with some extremely peculiar human gene sequences as well.”
Sulu’s eyebrows rose involuntarily. “Klingon —and human? Someone mixed those genes together deliberately?”
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Klass said with a small shrug. “After all, there are plenty of microorganisms capable of acquiring genes from one another through direct cytoplasmic transfer. That phenomenon alone might account for portions of the virus’s genome.”
“But not all of it.”
Klass nodded. “Right. The odds against this organism arising naturally are astronomical. It has far too many points of similarity to the pathogen that devastated the planet Qu’Vat in the twenty-second century to be unrelated.”
“Qu’Vat,” Sulu said. “That’s a Klingon colony, isn’t it?”
Klass nodded again. “Just two light-years from the border of Federation space. A Denobulan physician named Phlox wrote several papers detailing the plague that broke out there one hundred and thirty-five years ago, and its aftereffects. He drew heavily on the work of a Klingon geneticist named Antaak, who used tailored retroviruses to treat the plague.”
“Did these papers explain how both human and Klingon genes might have gotten g
rafted onto our virus?” Sulu asked.
“Phlox wrote extensively about Antaak’s recombinant DNA techniques,” Klass said, pinching the bridge of her nose as she considered the possibilities. “Of course, the genes could have jumped from one viral strain to another without any advanced lab work, especially in the original ‘wild’ airborne version of the pathogen. The virus we’re dealing with here could have picked up DNA sequences from members of one species before being transmitted to members of another species and picking up theirs, whether or not the original virus itself had been tinkered with in other respects.”
Because of his knowledge of the genetics of exotic plant life — he’d been an amateur exobotanist longer than he’d served in Starfleet, thanks in no small part to his mother’s work as an agronomist — Sulu was willing to believe that random mutations and gene transfers might explain the lethality of this new virus. But the horrible death of the woman in the bar — not to mention decades of suspicions about the motives of the Klingons — wouldn’t allow him to invoke pure coincidence just yet.
“Is it possible,” he said, “that the Klingons intended this virus to be a weapon?”
She spread her hands. “I can’t say for sure one way or the other. It’s tough to imagine anybody perverting bioscience in such a way as to deliberately create a bioweapon that kills the way this thing can. But I suppose we can’t put that past them, especially given what happened on Qu’Vat.”
Sulu felt a surge of embarrassment that he wasn’t better versed in the past couple of centuries of Klingon frontier history. “What do you mean?”
“Well, the Klingon scientist I mentioned — Antaak — worked on variants of his initial therapeutic Levodian flu retrovirus for years after the plague. It was as though he wasn’t satisfied with the cure, despite the millions of lives he was credited with saving. So he continued his recombinant DNA research. And either because of or in spite of this work — nobody really seems to know which — several million Klingons living on Qu’Vat died from another similar plague outbreak sometime in the early 2170s. Antaak himself was one of the casualties.”
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