Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [11]
“Theoretically I could compare normal specimens from any vulcanoid species with the disease specimens, but the match wouldn’t be exact,” Crusher said. “Romulans, I gather, from what little there is in the databanks, are different. And I’m still not clear on why I’m doing this.”
“Need to know, Doctor. I can’t tell you that now, but it’s urgent. Can you give me an ETA on when you’ll have those additional tests completed?”
“As soon as I can get this thing to grow in culture,” Crusher responded. “Even I can’t hurry Mother Nature.”
“Keep me informed,” Uhura said, and moved on.
Something one learned as a comm officer in a crisis was what Uhura called operational triage. Overwhelmed with multiphasic transmissions and often under fire, you had to decide in a heartbeat which messages were most important. Very often the voices yelling the loudest were the ones you could most safely ignore. It was the whispers you had to pay attention to.
This mission had begun with a whisper.
The fog in the Bay Area was particularly heavy that morning, and Uhura walked the winding paths of the gardens on the academy grounds more by familiarity than by sight, nodding to Boothby, who was dead-heading a row of rosebushes in front of the C-in-C’s office, and silently saluted her with the trimming shears as she passed. By midday, she knew, the marine layer would burn off, leaving a brilliantly sunny day, but for now the world existed only as far as the eye could see, which was only a meter or two in any direction.
By rights she could have had a groundcar bring her from home, or even beam directly in to her office as she did during emergencies, but unless it was raining she preferred to get off the monorail one stop early and walk to work, even on a day like today. If she had to be stuck behind that desk all day, at least she could start with a morning walk. It kept her young.
In retrospect, whoever sent the messenger must have known even that much about her. And if the messenger had been anything other than a messenger-an assassin perhaps, or even someone who thought kidnaping the head of Starfleet Intelligence might affect the balance of power on any number of worlds-Uhura shuddered to think. She would never know how the messenger got through the Academy’s security cordon, which was supposed to be one of the best on the planet.
The fog played tricks with sound. Footsteps and voices might sound close but in fact belong to those few cadets and instructors who had braved the weather and were passing between buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. At the same time, nearby sounds were muffled, hard to distinguish. The messenger made no sound, but simply fell into step beside her.
“You are Admiral Uhura.” The voice was female and seemed young. The words were in carefully spoken Standard, with only a trace of some offworld inflection. The figure, swathed in a hooded Vulcan-style travel cloak, was no taller than Uhura herself, who only made people think she was tall by the way she carried herself. “I bring you a message from Romulus.”
As Uhura turned, startled, a pair of jade-green eyes beneath the characteristic dark upswept brows met her own. A delicate face with a wide, expressive mouth, a smattering of freckles across a high-bridged nose, a stray lock of chestnut hair fallen across her brow, were all that showed beneath the hood. The first impression was of a child playing dress-up. Nevertheless, Uhura felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and found herself thinking of phasers.
A Romulan? On Earth, after all this time? And here on the grounds of the Academy without anyone stopping her?
“Who are you?” was all Uhura could think of to say, in a voice much calmer than she felt.
“Pandora’s box,” the messenger said.
It was a code spoken by another in a time long ago, and Uhura decided to trust her.
“Pandora’s box?” a very young Romulan subaltern named Cretak had repeated Uhura’s words. “What an interesting expression. What