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“Listener Tau-3,” said a voice through the static.

“Go ahead.”

“Confirming presence of disease entity designated colony world…” the voice said shakily. Male or female, and of what species, impossible to tell. The voice was deliberately filtered to foil attempts to intercept it or trace it back to source. “Have visual…”

“Project when ready, Tau-3,” Uhura said crisply. She nodded toward Crusher, who turned off the medical holos with the snap of a toggle. In their place appeared images out of several species’ infernal places.

The source was obviously a vid unit secreted on the person of someone walking through a hospital or clinic or quarantine station, then coded and transmitted on a piggyback frequency across parsecs of space, and the quality of the image was commensurately bad-shaky, in and out of focus, the lighting sometimes so poor the image was lost altogether. What came through was a jumble of ghostly figures, and a great deal of sound.

The figures were Romulans of all ages, some packed together on rows and rows of medical cots, the overspill milling about, propped up in corners, lying on the floor. Healers, some of them looking as ill as their patients, moved hastily among them offering whatever little comfort they could. A no-doubt dangerously obtained close-up of a group of children showed them huddled together, some coughing uncontrollably, others retching helplessly, great running sores on their faces, virid blood running from their noses or flecking their parched lips. Those whose lungs still worked howled or whimpered with pain. The others could only gasp helplessly, their eyes frightened, their little sides heaving with the effort to draw breath.

The Listener with the hidden camera, probably a Vulcan passing as a Romulan, moved with difficulty past a steady stream of incoming patients until the camera showed daylight, and a line of sick and dying Romulans, some too weak to stand without holding themselves up against the outer wall of the building, waiting for admission to the clinic. The line extended as far as the camera could project before the image was lost.

“Confirmation…” the Listener’s voice said once the image disappeared. “Estimate ten percent of the population of…” The code name for the city was lost in static, but Uhura knew the Listener’s location anyway. “Among the sick, no survivors. This is no rumor.”

“Message received, Tau-3,” Uhura said, putting far more bravado into her voice than she felt. “Get out of the hot zone now. Your job is done. Report back to base for some leave time, and-“

“Negative, Command. Evidencing the symptoms myself. Estimate less than one hour before delirium ensues. Terminating now…”

No one spoke for some moments after the transmission ended. Finally McCoy cleared his throat.

“Just when you think you’ve seen everything… guess there’s no question now whether this is real or not.”

“Or that it’s manufactured,” Crusher added sharply. “This isn’t a natural phenomenon. It was created. How, why, or by whom-“

“We can assume the why,” Uhura said. She would deal with losing a top operative, and also a friend, later. “The three of you are going to find out how, and I’m going to find out by whom. Dr. Selar?”

“There is a traceable disease vector, Admiral,” Selar reported evenly, the best among all of them at disguising her reaction to what they had just witnessed. “If all of your Listeners confirm what your original source provided…” Now it was Selar’s turn to use the holo program to draw up a star map highlighting a sector which included several Romulan colony worlds, a segment of the Neutral Zone, and a cluster of Federation worlds on the other side. Four of the Romulan worlds were highlighted. “… we can be certain that the disease has occurred at selected sites on these four worlds. In addition…”

She manipulated the map to show more of the Federation side.

“Beginning with the seventy-three seemingly isolated cases on these seventeen worlds, I have developed an algorithm which would not only analyze any reports of similar symptoms