Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [32]
No one actually looked to Selar for confirmation or denial. The question, like the holos, hung in the air unanswered.
“Even so,” Crusher said after an uncomfortable silence. “Bacteria, as I say, are incredibly easy to kill. If that was all we had here, we could develop a vaccine from the killed strains, inoculate anyone in a hot zone, maybe share the vaccine with the Romulans as a good-will gesture, problem solved. But…”
With the flick of a toggle, she made the tetanus bacillus vanish and moved the Gnawing bacillus to one side.
“Some bacteria can mutate into viruses, which is what we think was the case with the prototypical Gnawing,” she said as several new images slowly materialized. “We can only conjecture, because we don’t have records from the pandemic two thousand years ago. And I imagine it might be very difficult to send someone to Romulus to gather soil samples in remote areas in the hopes of finding an unadulterated cluster of Gnawing microbes.”
Difficult, Uhura thought, but probably not impossible. She had in fact sent one of her Listeners to do just that, but the Listener had not yet reported back.
“Now, viruses are much, much smaller than bacteria, more difficult to detect, and much more mutable, hence difficult to cure,” Crusher was saying. She had conjured up six new images by now. “I’ve selected just a few examples that have plagued humans in the past…”
She highlighted each image as she identified it: “Herpes” was an orange, sponge-shaped orb with a spiked multicolored ring around it. “Polio” looked like nothing so much as an attractive blue-green sea anemone. “Smallpox” was a rusty-looking ovoid with an hourglass shape inside. “Hantavirus” looked like land masses on a planet, sickly pink, dotted with malevolent-looking little black seeds around the edges of each “continent.”
“Ebola,” Crusher continued. This looked like an aerial view of a series of crop circles in a wheat field. “Skorr pox.” This was a series of gray concentric hexagons. “And finally human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.”
Glanced at quickly, this one was formless, a spider’s nest, a tuft of cat hair, something that might have rolled out from under the bed. But Crusher dismissed all the other images except the Gnawing, which still lingered on the periphery, and began to slowly enlarge the HIV virus. Gradually it became an elliptical shape with another shape inside it like an inverted tear drop, with a third, cylindrical shape within that. All of the shapes were studded about with strange artifacts that the readout identified as “surface glycoproteins,” “HLA I and II,” “core proteins (modified by AT-2).”
“I chose this one,” Crusher said, “Because it seems to most closely mimic the end stage of the bug we’re dealing with. Or, at least, one of the end stages.”
“One of them?” McCoy echoed her, scowling.
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Crusher said.
“Go on,” Uhura encouraged her.
“Let’s take another look at our prime suspect,” she said. The HIV, rather than disappearing, simply moved slightly away from center stage at her instructions and the Gnawing bacillus moved in to hover beside it.
“I started with the specimens from the locket,” she explained. “There were four distinct compartments inside with blood, skin and hair samples from four victims. They were collected so meticulously I was able to classify them by gender and blood type. Whoever put this together was very skilled.”
She looked pointedly at Uhura. The question she wanted to ask was one Uhura still couldn’t answer. Were the samples themselves faked? Was this all a ploy to spread false rumors about an epidemic that didn’t exist, to divert Starfleet energies into pursuing a phantom, even to create an interstellar incident based on accusations of biological warfare? No way to answer any of that yet. Uhura wondered what progress Tuvok was making with Zetha.
“Go on,” she told Crusher.
“I grew each of these specimens in culture,