Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [31]
“First things first!” he blustered now. “We’ve got to know what this thing is before we start trying to figure out where it came from.”
Uhura shot him a Who’s in charge here? look and turned to Crusher. “Dr. Crusher, you have the floor.”
“Right.” She took a deep breath and began. “Assuming this is actually a variant of the disease the Romulans call the Gnawing, its original source is a naturally occurring bacterium found in the soil of the Romulan homeworld.
“Bacteria, for our purposes, Admiral, are ‘big’ germs, easy to see under a microscope, fairly easy to kill. Just for show and tell, I’ll give you some examples….”
Three images, projected from a fifth locus of the holoprogram, materialized in the middle of their field of vision. Each was about a foot high and floated in mid-air; each was a many-times magnified three-dimensional realization of what would be visible under a microscope. One was a bright red-orange podlike shape containing five orange ovules that could have been peas or soybeans but, in fact, as the readout beside it attested, were the spores of botulism. The second, a methane-blue sphere with a fluid, coruscated surface, from which smaller, seedlike purplish spheres were escaping like solar flares, identified itself as bubonic plague. The third and central one featured scatterings of purple rods like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone, though with the characteristic drumstick knob at one end which identified the “sprinkles” as tetanus. As Crusher spoke, the images pirouetted slowly to 360 degrees and back again, displaying themselves in all their deadly glory.
Uhura, to whom this was all new, watched transfixed. The others, who had seen these maleficences and others before, still found them strangely compelling. When she thought they’d seen enough, Crusher made all but the tetanus image vanish, and brought up a new image whose “drumsticks,” interspersed with vague, shapeless blotches, looked very similar to the tetanus, except that they were yellowish-brown in color.
“What you’re looking at here,” Crusher said, “is a specimen, taken from the locket Admiral Uhura delivered to Starfleet Medical yesterday, of something that we have been told is killing Romulans on some of their colony worlds, and which may be related to the historic Romulan plague known as the Gnawing. If this is in fact the same entity, it’s very much like tetanus and, like tetanus, it’s a killer, a killer that can lie dormant for decades, even centuries, until the soil is disturbed by plowing or building roads, or even by a child playing in the dirt. And, like tetanus, the original form is only dangerous if ingested or if it infiltrates an open wound. It’s not contagious. It can’t be passed from person to person like a head cold.”
“Further,” Selar chimed in. “It would be most unlikely for an identical bacterium to be found in the soil of as many different planets, spread across as wide a region of space, as have thus far yielded casualties of this disease. The bacterium that resulted in the Gnawing has thus far never been found on any world other than Romulus.”
“With you so far,” Uhura said, hearing a resonance of the shared Vulcan/Romulan it-is-not-a-lie-to-keep-the-truth-to-oneself behind Selar’s words. Later she would take Selar aside privately and ask her how much she’d known about the Gnawing, and from what sources, before this. But now was not the time. “But if it’s not contagious, how did it kill up to fifty percent of the population of Romulus nearly two thousand years ago?”
“We do not know that for certain, Admiral,” Selar said. “History is often replete with exaggeration.”
“Nevertheless, Selar, it did kill enough people to make it into the histories. I can’t believe they all contracted it from soil samples.”
“There might have been an airborne version,” Crusher suggested. “Which might have been contagious, transmitted by a cough or sneeze. As could an animal-to-Romulan form, like the bubonic plague on Earth, which was transmitted from