Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [116]
And I’m still at my post trying to save the universe, she thought. Just this one more mission, and-
“Go ahead, Doctor.”
“We’ve got more than enough evidence now to hang this on the Romulans.”
“No argument there,” Uhura acknowledged. On her desktop, reports on a half-dozen new crises were streaming in from Listeners flung across two quadrants and she watched them slot into different categories of crisis awaiting SI’s attention. “Now why don’t you say what’s really on your mind?”
“Lives are being lost, and we seem to be wandering around in circles. How much longer do we continue sending the away team from one planet to another to another before we bring the evidence we have to Command and to the Federation Council and whoever else we need to and-“
“And accomplish what exactly? Alerting the Romulan Empire as a whole to what we know won’t cure this disease, Doctor.”
“We can just ask them if they’re experiencing anything similar inside the Empire. Suggest we work together on a cure. Let them take all the credit if they offer one. Because if they created this, they must have a cure.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because it would be suicide to do otherwise. The odds on something this deadly spreading throughout the entire Empire-I can’t believe they’d do that.”
Uhura sighed. Every generation had to be taught anew. “Then you don’t know Romulans. Granted, there have been no official contacts since Tomed, but go through your archives and see how many instances we know of where Romulan medical personnel have used experimental drugs on subject populations…”
“That’s different,” Crusher argued. “A drug can be targeted and controlled. A contagion without a cure can’t.” She shuddered, stuck her hands in the pockets of her smock. “Every time I have to work with this thing, no matter what precautions we take, I keep thinking of what could happen if it got out of the lab somehow, if I accidentally brought it home, if a ship whose crew is infected pulled into Spacedock and somehow brought it to Earth. I want a universe in which my son will be safe!”
“Don’t you think I want that as well?” Uhura demanded. “But we ask the Romulans if they know anything about it, and then what? They deny any knowledge of it until they can produce enough evidence to say we created it. How will that make the universe safer? Answer me that. You’re young; I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a combat situation, but-“
“I lost my husband to one.”
That shocked Uhura into silence. She’d forgotten the circumstances of Jack Crusher’s death. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she spoke again.
“I’d forgotten that. And I am sorry. But let me try to explain something to you.” She deactivated the incoming messages screen-it would be waiting for her the next time she accessed it-folded her hands, leaned forward, and gave Crusher her complete attention. “The reason I am still at this desk instead of off on my own private island somewhere where there are no comm screens, is because I want to do as much as I can to stop the screaming.”
“The screaming? I’m sorry, Admiral, I-“
“I won’t presume to burden you with my experiences, with the number of times in the course of my career that I sat at that communications console listening to the screaming. Because that’s what a comm officer always has to contend with, is the screaming. You have to keep the channels open, keep listening in case the enemy wants to surrender, but mostly what you hear and keep on hearing is the screaming. Until the moment comes when you don’t hear it anymore, you merely watch the debris field scatter across your forward screen. And then you listen to the silence, but it still sounds like screaming.”
She paused for breath, more exercised than Crusher had ever seen