Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [134]
“What took you so long, Ben?” Leyton had come down to sickbay personally. “For a minute there, we thought we were going to lose you. No one said you had to go down with the ship.”
“Just saying goodbye,” Sisko said. He nodded toward the transmitter. “And wanted to make sure we brought all the evidence.”
“Not worth risking your life for,” was Leyton’s opinion. “You’re an innocent, Ben. Don’t you know if there isn’t enough evidence, you can always invent some?”
“Sir?” Sisko asked, but Leyton had moved on.
Under orders from Starfleet Command, the away team had been beamed directly into quarantine in sickbay. Selar assured them it would not be for long.
Curzon Dax and Admiral Tal had a less than productive encounter with the Renagan Council of Elders.
“Isn’t this a violation of your Federation’s touted Prime Directive?” Tal remarked once they’d finally beamed down to Renaga and met face to face.
Curzon smiled as they strode together up the broad steps of the Council building. “Not in this instance. The Renagans have had outworld visitors before. Some have actually beamed down in their presence and been ignored. The Renagans simply refuse to believe that anyone lives on the lights in their sky. You’ll see.”
The meeting, if such it could be called, was exactly as Curzon said it would be. The nine doddering old men studied the two visitors, then conferred among themselves before their leader spoke.
“You say you are not of this world. That is not possible. Therefore we know you are lying, and we do not acknowledge you.”
As one, the Elders turned their backs on them.
Tal took a step forward, as if to argue, but a gesture from Curzon stayed him.
“They did actually speak to us,” he whispered. “It’s more than they’ve done for anyone else. It’s a beginning; let it be enough for now. If we try to push it, they’ll interpret it as weakness. There will be other times.”
Tal clenched his teeth in frustration. “Fools!” he growled as he and Curzon walked together down the broad steps of the Council building, completely ignored by the passersby, and returned to where they had beamed down. “To stand there and speak to us, yet tell us we do not exist-! The urge to knock their rotten old heads together…”
“Try negotiating with Klingons sometime,” Curzon muttered. “We shall report back to our respective governments and let them decide what to do.”
He and Tal eyed each other with mutual respect. “Jolan tru, my newfound friend,” Curzon said. “Perhaps someday we’ll meet again.”
“After half a century of silence?” Tal snorted, but then thought about it. He shrugged. “Who knows?”
There is an art to leaving the battleground when no battle has taken place. In a graceful maneuver worthy of a Strauss waltz, warbird and starship pirouetted away from each other under impulse and, their navigators having plotted the quickest route out of the Zone, turned their backs on each other, and catapulted into warp and away.
No way of knowing what happened aboard the warbird. Aboard Okinawa, a medical conference was under way.
“This is the result of introducing a serum derived from the blood of the dead Romulan on Quirinus into a sample of active Catalyst virus,” Selar was saying, her data safe in Okinawa’s databanks and being relayed to Starfleet Medical on Earth. “This, the result of a similar serum derived from blood samples Dr. Crusher took from Zetha before we left Earth, also interacting with live Catalyst virus.”
There was no need to give a play-by-play. Everyone watching, from McCoy to Crusher to Uhura to the away team to Okinawa’s medical staff, who had cleared the team to leave quarantine once they’d seen the test results, could see what was happening. Dr. Selar’s two experimental sera were gobbling up the Catalyst virus faster than it could replicate.
“There