Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [70]
“Thank you,” Zetha said, lowering her eyes much as Sisko had seen Tuvok and Selar do. It was a good performance.
“Your sister’s eldest?” Sisko challenged Selar as the Listener left them and went off to arrange passage on one of the interdome tubes.
Selar quirked an eyebrow at him. “My sister has three offspring, therefore logically one must be the eldest.”
“But you said Zetha was-“
“I did not. I said ‘my sister’s eldest.’ I did not say ‘She is my sister’s eldest.’ That the Listener chose to interpret my statement-“
“I see,” Sisko said, shaking his head in amazement. “So that’s how it’s done!”
McCoy looked up from the screen and rubbed his bleary eyes, which by now were more red than blue. It was nearly dawn. Behind him the computer voice droned on, tirelessly reciting the data on telomerases he had sent it in search of while he scanned every paper on cytokine engineering in the UFP medical database. He’d thought multitasking would speed the process, but the computer’s voice was getting to him.
“Shut the hell up, will you?” he growled. “I’m trying to concentrate here!” The computer, not hearing the proper command, droned on. “Goddamn literal-minded machine. Computer, mute!”
He cursed himself for being old and absent-minded. Forty, fifty, a hundred years ago he’d been up on all the journal entries and known who was working on what, and the rumor mill would have told him who among that elite group of scientists whose talents lay with gene splicing might have gone bad. Now he had to go through reams of data comparing the ever-mutating viruses not only with each other, but with similar archived bugs, looking for a common denominator. While he searched, people were dying. He could hear the agonal final beating of their hearts, hear their labored breathing ratcheting down like so many broken clocks.
“What’s the rush?” he chided himself. “It’s not up to you to find a cure, just the perpetrator. You keep charging ahead, you might miss something important. Slow down!”
In the private lake at the back of his property, he could almost hear the trout taunting him, leaping and splashing with complete impunity, knowing he was too busy to get at them now.
“Motivation…” he muttered. “What’s his motivation? Why would someone create a killer like this? Is he psychotic? Trying to control the galaxy? Distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the natives so he can claim their land for his own? Or is it revenge? On whom, for what? Figure out his game, and you’ll find him…”
When at last he found what he was looking for, the realization almost knocked him out of his chair.
“Why, you smarmy sonofabitch!” he muttered triumphantly, seeing the similarity between one of the mutations Crusher had isolated and an illustration from a paper presented at the Federation Medical Academy over a dozen years before. “I’ve got you now! I told them there’d be a signature!”
He pushed a button on the arm of his chair and it floated gently off the floor and hovered on a cushion of air. The chair had been a gift from Spock some years ago after McCoy had reached 125, an acknowledgment that the doctor’s human legs were not as strong as they once were. McCoy zoomed across the room to the comm unit and, not bothering to check what time it was in San Francisco, opened a frequency.
“Nyota, Beverly?” he shouted, his voice shaking with excitement. “Come on, ladies, get on the horn. I’ve got him! I know who created this goddamn bug. I’ve found the signature. Where’s Selar?”
“Nothing like what you’re describing,” Dr. Sekaran told Selar when the Listener had left them alone in the heart of the medical dome on Tenjin V. “The only unusual event we’ve had in the past