Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [40]
As the door closed behind him, she glanced up at Jean-Luc with some concern. “Did you get enough sleep?”
He waved the question away, though not as irritably as he might have, and sat down. “I take it that the prognosis isn’t good.”
She shook her head, looked out through the office walls. “What treatment we’re giving him is essentially palliative at this point. We could keep him on life support indefinitely, of course, but besides the ethical constraints, there would be no point in it: his nervous system is disintegrating.”
Picard blinked. “Is this something secondary to that neural damage you mentioned?”
“No, but that’s making him a lot easier to kill.” She turned her viewer so that he could see the screen. “Look.”
Picard looked at the diagram there: the familiar shell-coat and coiled-DNA interior of a virus. “This is what’s infesting him?”
“This is what he was inoculated with,” Beverly said, once again feeling her insides twist up with loathing at the thought. “This virus is tailored specifically to his genetic structure. Stewart came aboard carrying it. It was hiding inside him, like one of the old “slow” viruses. This one has been instructed to hide inside white blood cells, encapsulated, so as not to trigger either the immune response or our scans.”
“A nasty variation of the “purloined-letter” technique.”
Beverly nodded. “Worse yet, the thing was programmed to go off at a specific time. It’s doable enough—you program a secondary protein casing around the virus that defeats the virus’s attempts to reproduce, then simply tell the coating when to come apart and turn the little monsters loose. It’s actually a variation of a technique that’s used for therapy on intractable cancers in quite a few different species. A perversion of it, rather.”
“I take it,” Picard said, looking over his shoulder for a moment, “Stewart’s time ran out.”
Beverly nodded again, wearily. “By the time the security people noticed that something was wrong with him, the damage was already mostly done. The virus was keyed to attack the myelin sheaths of his nerves— meaning the white matter of his brain as well as the major myelinized conduits in his spinal cord. Cerebellar malfunction follows, along with respiratory dysfunction, coronary insufficiency, not to mention brain damage—his corpus callosum is almost fused.”
“He will die, then.”
“He will.” For a moment they were both quiet. “The worst of it,” Beverly said, “is that they never planned to pick him up. Probably they assumed that, if we didn’t find him first, he would start feeling bad and hide himself somewhere—then die quietly in a corner.”
Picard’s face was very still; but he looked up at her without expressing anything more of what he was feeling. “If I know you,” he said very gently, “that is not the worst of it.”
She looked up at him and sighed at her own readability at times like this. “No,” Beverly said finally, “it’s not. What is worst is the probability that it was my counterpart on the other Enterprise who is responsible for this.”
The look of shock on Jean-Luc’s face said that he understood the problem.
“The work has my fingerprints all over it. The structure of the outer coat on the virus, even the spiral-structured flagellum it used to site itself in the lymph nodes—they’re details I’ve built into cancer cures before.” Beverly swallowed. “What kind of universe is it where the usages of medicine allow a practitioner to do such things? What is a doctor here? Or worse—”
“What kind of doctor does such things if the usages of medicine don’t allow them?” Picard said softly.
“Exactly,” Beverly said, and couldn’t bring herself to say anything more.
“Doctor?” said Lieutenant Rawlings, putting his head in the door.
She and Picard both looked up. “Captain,” Bob said.