Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [37]
Uhura sighed. “All right, Tuvok. Let her sleep for now. I’d like your report on my desk by tomorrow morning.”
“It is on its way to you now, Admiral.”
Uhura suppressed a smile, seeing the telltale blinking on her console. “Figures. You’re off-duty for tonight, Mister. Get some shut-eye yourself. I’ll call you when I need you, and I want you sharp when I do.”
The three doctors had listened silently to Tuvok’s report, and they remained silent now. Selar’s maps, like all the previous visuals, had been terminated, and the space between them was empty, except for McCoy’s, which still held stars and crickets. Uhura drummed her fingers on the desktop for a moment, thinking.
She’d been wondering what to do with Zetha from the moment the girl appeared. She still wasn’t sure, but she was beginning to get an idea.
“Dr. Crusher, I think I can provide you with at least one healthy Romulan for your tests. You can see her tomorrow after she’s had a good night’s sleep. She’ll need a physical before we go any further, anyway.”
Crusher’s eyes widened. “You have a Romulan, here? Why wasn’t I informed before this?”
“We need to find the link between those two disease vectors,” Uhura said succinctly, adjourning the meeting without actually answering the question. “To do that, we need to look at this thing from the ground. I’m sending an away team into the Zone. Dismissed.”
“Pretty grim stuff on that visual feed,” McCoy remarked after Crusher and Selar had signed off. “And it means you’ve lost one of your Listeners. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Uhura said, keeping her voice level. She would grieve later. “Just when I think I’ve seen everything… Tell me, Leonard, how do you ever get used to it?”
“Who says you get used to it? It’s just as grim the hundredth time you see it as it is the first. I’ll tell you, though, it’s the sounds that get to me more. The sound of a child in pain, no matter the species… you hear it in your sleep; you never get used to it. If you do, it just means you’re too hardened to be a good doctor, and it’s time you cashed it in.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you back in for this,” she said.
“Oh, the hell with that!” McCoy dismissed it with a wave of his hand. He studied her face and didn’t like the expression he saw there. She could have terminated their transmission at the same time she’d dismissed the other two, but she hadn’t. “Nyota? Can I ask you something, just between us?”
“Sure.”
“What’re you going to do if we find out this is manufactured? And since most of the casualties so far seem to be on the Romulan side, well, what if it’s someone from our side?”
Her chin came up. The look in her eye was deadly. “I’d like to personally track them down, point a phaser between their eyebrows if they have any, and force them to inject themselves with their own disease.”
McCoy waited. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled.
“However, I probably won’t be allowed to do that. Let’s find them first. And then we’ll see.”
“I need help with this!” the voice said, cracking around the edges. “I told you we shouldn’t wait too long. There’s a delicate balance between letting this spread just so far and having it reach pandemic proportions. You promised me-!”
“If you can possibly keep your mouth shut,” Koval said icily, annoyed at being interrupted during his daily soak in his own personal hot spring, “you will hear me once again tell you that nothing will go wrong. Did you hear me? Nothing will go wrong.”
Chapter 6
“I sometimes think,” Uhura told Ambassador Dax that evening, “that there were only two events of significance in the universe, the Big Bang and Camp Khitomer. My cadets may think I’m old enough to have been present at the first, but I will admit to being present at the latter.”
“What’s the saying? ‘All roads lead to Khitomer,’ ” Curzon Dax said with a twinkle in his voice as well as his eyes. He was flirting with her as usual, for all the good it would do him. “And this one is no different. There’s something on your desk and on your mind that has you thinking of