Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [10]
“It’s called Communications 101,” she explained, leading them down the corridors. “It’s been called that since the Academy was founded. When I took over, the deans suggested I could change it to whatever I wanted, but I’ve kept the designation. After all, if you think about it, the secret to understanding the universe is communication…”
Just this mission and then no more, she thought, the disease vectors she’d passed on to McCoy still active in her mind, resonating with visions of death and more death. Because if in fact my source inside the Empire is correct and this is not a natural phenomenon, but something someone has created for whatever hideous reasons, and if I and my “shadow people” can’t resolve it, it could be yet another excuse for war.
I went into intelligence work for one reason only, because I believe that the military solution must be the last and not the first choice. This has always been my philosophy both as a Starfleet officer and as a private person. Consequently I must use all the Starfleet resources at my disposal to try to stop this thing before it’s too late!
Chapter 2
When Crusher had completed the first round of tests at Uhura’s request, she had asked the same thing McCoy would ask a few days later. “Where did these tissue samples come from?”
“Inside the Romulan Empire,” was all Uhura said.
“How did-?” Crusher started to say, then realized she wouldn’t get an answer. She thought of a different question. “How can you be sure they’re genuine?”
“I trust the source. I’ve also got my Listeners trying to get confirmation.”
Uhura’s Listeners were many and varied, the backbone of Intelligence under her command, from sleepers who committed themselves to a lifetime on the inside-Vulcans passing as Romulans, humans surgically altered to resemble a dozen other species that bore watching-to troubleshooters thrown into crises while they were happening, who landed on their feet and did their best at damage control, to dozens of communications officers on Starfleet ships flung across the quadrant who, in between their assigned duties, monitored every stray frequency that passed through their consoles, listening for… anything. A sudden flurry of trade agreements in an Orion-controlled sector which meant the pirates were smuggling arms again, a rumor that a Coridan ambassador’s death by food poisoning might not have been food poisoning at all but a carefully planned assassination or, now, a tale from the heart of the Empire of a disease thought all but eradicated a thousand years ago which in its latest incarnation killed everyone in its path-there was little that escaped the eyes and ears of the Listeners, even after half a century of “official” silence.
While Crusher had been running preliminary tests, Uhura had been fielding any number of transmissions that began with “Admiral, this might not mean anything, but…” Her job was to pull all the strands together and weave them into a tapestry of information that presented a coherent picture, however long it took.
“Is there enough there to go on?” she asked Crusher now.
“I don’t know yet,” Crusher said. “The tests I’ve run so far indicate this thing is particularly virulent. And it doesn’t respond to antibiotics, known antiviral agents, or even household bleach. Radiation will kill it back temporarily, but only in amounts that would kill the patient. Turn the radiation off and the bug regenerates.”
“Is there anything you can do?” Uhura asked.
“I’ll need to grow a big enough batch of it in culture to run some more tests. If we had time, we could work on cracking the genetic code, then developing an antigene to combat this.”
“What kind of time are we talking about?”
Crusher shrugged. “Weeks, maybe months, maybe not at all without samples from healthy Romulans to compare this with.”
“Could you