Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [117]
“I would like, very much,” she said slowly, “to live the rest of my life without ever again having to listen to the screaming.
“Now, then,” she said, changing gears suddenly, all business again. “This is what we’re going to do. The away team is on its way to Renaga to collect samples of this hilopon and see if it works. If it does, Q.E.D., we bring in the diplomats and the away team comes home. If it doesn’t, I recall the away team anyway, and I get word to Cretak about what we’ve found so far. Then she and I decide what happens next.”
“You’d send Zetha back to her?” Crusher asked for want of anything better to say. “And what about this Thamnos character?”
“Let’s wait and see what the away team finds,” was all Uhura would say.
“And Catalyst?”
“Catalyst!” Uhura repeated bitterly. Why had Command dreamed up such a beautiful name for such a deadly thing? “We keep on looking for a cure. I don’t have a better answer than that, do you?”
“Shooting fish in a barrel,” Sisko muttered as he and Tuvok scanned through several hundred meters of rock to find Cinchona’s laboratory deep inside the mountain and read one solitary life-form within.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s too easy,” Sisko said, suppressing the cough that still plagued him despite Selar’s having given him a complete physical and finding no physiological cause. “Nothing else about this mission has been spelled out in big block letters for us. Something in my bones tells me we’re being set up, and I don’t like it.”
They had scanned Renaga from space, registering a predominantly agrarian society on a temperate but thin-soiled Class-M planet. There seemed to be no large cities, only narrow-laned villages clustered atop steep-sloped mountains, most of them walled and fortified.
“It appears to be a preindustrial society,” Tuvok observed. “I note the equivalent of oxcarts, and some faster indigenous steeds vaguely resembling horses. Unpaved roads, no motorized vehicles or machinery of any kind. Agriculture is conducted by manual labor or with the use of draft animals.”
“Wonder why most of the settlements are clumped on top of the hills like that?” Sisko wondered. “Even if they use most of the land for agriculture, you’d think they’d build a farmhouse in the fields now and then. Floods, maybe?”
“Perhaps they were originally fortresses,” Tuvok suggested. “Possibly suggesting a long history of fighting among local warlords.”
“Of course!” Sisko said. “You think there’s any centralized government at all?”
“Not our concern,” Tuvok said, homing in on a particular sector where something had caught his interest. “We are here to gather hilopon and, if possible, find the individual who submitted the paper to the Journal. The less attention we attract, the better.”
“Agreed. But I meant to ask you about that. How can we be so sure he’s here, if-” Sisko began, but then he noticed what Tuvok had picked up on his scanner. “That can’t be right. You said this was a preindustrial society.”
“I did,” Tuvok acknowledged.
“Then what are they doing with a subspace transmitter? And am I imagining things, or is that a Romulan signature?”
“You are not imagining things,” Tuvok assured him.
A scan of the entire planet in fact revealed three Romulan transmitters, two of which were being intermittently used by a handful of Romulans to send strings of code, probably to a warbird lurking somewhere on the fringes of the Zone. Tuvok would send samples back to Starfleet Command for decoding. The third transmitter, sending from a cave beneath one of the hilltop cities, might have been a Romulan transmitter, but it was not being used by a Romulan.
“The difference is subtle,” Tuvok reported. “But unless I am mistaken, this individual is a Rigelian.”
That was when Sisko began wondering why it was all suddenly so easy. The sight of Cinchona’s life-form reading, alone within his unguarded mountain fastness, was making him twitchy. Not for the first time, he suppressed the urge to cough.
“You’d think someone sitting on what could be one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century would