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“Anyone sneezes, she’s on it,” McCoy offered, trying to shake them all out of the mood the Listener’s video had plunged them into. “Clever girl!”

“Indeed,” Selar said, accepting the compliment. She either was in awe of the senior physician or simply had a far greater tolerance for McCoy’s humanity than most Vulcans. “Such variables as reports of increased numbers of head-colds, absenteeism from work or school, antiviral prescriptions, and use of native remedies or vitamin supplements are included in the algorithm.”

“Throughout the entire Federation?” Crusher marveled. “You have been busy!”

“And-?” Uhura prompted, glancing at the chrono. Selar’s ship would be requesting docking clearance at Spacedock in less than thirty minutes, and they’d have to terminate this meeting beforehand so the discrete would not interfere with ship-to-shore transmissions.

“Two hundred seven cases reporting symptoms such as we have just seen on the Romulan colony, on eighteen Federation worlds and two outposts along the Neutral Zone,” Selar reported. “Given the number of worlds surveyed, there are not many cases, but there have been no survivors. If in fact it is the same entity, the vector is here.”

The map rotated, and a bright red line superimposed itself over known space, connecting the dots on the Federation side. A concomitant green line connected the four Romulan colonies. The two lines stopped at the Neutral Zone, but seemed almost to be reaching toward each other. With a little bit of imagination, one could draw a dotted red and green line, connecting a scattering of inhabited worlds between the two.

“I am continuing to run the algorithm as new case reports come in,” Selar concluded. “However, as of yet I am unable to determine how this has been able to spread among these distant worlds. All persons transporting from ship to ship or ship to surface are screened for disease entities, all goods are irradiated.”

“Not all, Selar,” Crusher said. “Someone got these specimens across the Zone to Admiral Uhura.”

All eyes turned to Uhura. “Only persons or objects passing through a transporter are screened,” she said, and left it at that. “And even that’s about to be remedied.”

“Meanwhile, this thing is spreading!” McCoy voiced what they all feared. He really was too old for this. “Unchecked, it could hopscotch from every world where we’ve found it clear across two quadrants. Even if it doesn’t, it could potentially create panic, put a stop to interplanetary travel, bring commerce to a standstill, quarantine the affected worlds, turn them into charnel houses…”

“Then we’d better get busy,” Uhura said with more enthusiasm than she felt.

“If it is manufactured,” McCoy said, almost to himself. “It will have a signature.”

“A signature?” Uhura echoed him.

“Mad scientists are like mad bombers or computer hack-ers,” he explained, his eyes very far away, as if he were scanning his own personal memory banks for a datum that was just out of reach. “They leave a signature, a calling card, some little sarcastic fillip encoded into the virus that says: ‘This is mine.’ It stokes their egos, makes them feel important…”

He drifted off for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. Finally he said: “You leave this sonofabitch to me. If he’s ever done anything even remotely like this before on any scale, I’ll track him through the database, and I’ll catch him!”

Uhura said nothing, but she knew he knew this was why she’d wanted him on the team.

Crusher was off on her own train of thought. “What I wouldn’t give for one living Romulan to run some background tests on-!” she said.

Uhura’s intercom beeped again. It was Tuvok.

“Sorry to interrupt, Admiral. You said you wanted a preliminary report.”

“I did. Go ahead.”

“Our subject is sleeping at present. The first phase of our interview is concluded.”

“And-?”

“And, as discussed earlier, I believe, as you do, that either she is exactly what she says she is, or she is under such deep cover that, barring a mind-meld,