Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [33]
“Left over from the Earth-Romulan War,” Uhura said tightly, watching Crusher’s and Selar’s eyebrows go up simultaneously. “And… other sources. On the rare occasion we’ve taken a Romulan prisoner alive, we take blood samples. They do the same with captured humans.”
She was avoiding McCoy’s eyes, though she could see him in her peripheral vision, scratching his stubble and looking uncomfortable. They both knew of at least three captured Romulans from their early years together, a commander accidentally beamed aboard Enterprise, and two of her guards who had started out as exchange prisoners but had not been returned until long after Enterprise had beaten a hasty retreat out of the Neutral Zone with a stolen cloaking device.
“Go on,” she told Crusher again.
“When I compared the normals with the disease entities, the results were almost too good. There was the bug, all right. So I knew it would grow in vitro. I ran simulations based on several terrestrial and Vulcan life-forms.”
“Quite logical,” Selar commended her.
“Anyway,” Crusher went on. “There it was. But then I thought, ‘It can’t be this easy.’ And I was right. Because within two hours of regrowth, it had mutated into a viral form.”
Slowly she enlarged the Gnawing specimen image until the yellow-brown rods and vague blotches almost blotted out the empty space between, and some of the blotches showed bright green patches of something else. The entire entity moved, replicating inexorably as they watched, seeming almost to pulse malevolently.
“This is why it took me twenty-four hours to report,” Crusher explained. “Because we had to rule out the possibility that this might be a totally separate entity, so we observed isolated specimens of the bacillus until we actually caught them mutating into the viral form. What you’re looking at here is a time-lapsed version, ten hours compressed into less than a minute.” She froze the image. “And right about here seems to be the point at which the virus then mutates into a retrovirus.”
She paused. Her fellow MDs were looking grim. Uhura looked puzzled.
“Now I’m going to have to ask you to explain to me the difference between a virus and a retrovirus,” she said. “Use nice, simple words, please. As if you were explaining it to your son.”
The mention of Wesley, who’d just turned eleven, made Crusher smile.
“I think Wes is a lot more interested in physics than medicine. I guess most kids want to find themselves instead of following in their parents’ footsteps. Still, it isn’t really that complicated. A retrovirus is a virus that can infiltrate at the genetic level, become part of the patient’s DNA. HIV is a classic example. And I believe this thing is, too.”
“Okay,” Uhura said. “Still with you.”
“Now, we have the technology to not only identify every known virus, but to develop algorithms to identify unknowns. It might take a while, but we’d eventually catch the thing. Then we’d work backwards to create a decoy and-“
“A decoy,” Uhura repeated.
Crusher nodded. “I’ll use the HIV as an example, because it’s old news and we know exactly how it behaves and how to circumvent it: The virus attacks healthy cells by finding a way to get inside them and kill them. In the case of HIV, it does this by infiltrating a protein embedded in a T-cell membrane.
“T-cells are the Good Guys,” she said helpfully before Uhura could ask. “But HIV invaded the T-cells by attaching itself to the CD4 receptor located on the surface protein, and deactivated the T-cells. Without enough healthy T-cells, the patient had no defenses against a host of opportunistic infections and even certain cancers, and wasted away and died. With me so far?”
Not about to ask what a CD4 receptor was, Uhura nodded. “So far, yes.”
“Now, one way to distract the HIV virus and keep it from attacking the T-cells was to create a decoy cell. Decoy cells