Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [93]
“Well, I’m assuming green for you, dear, because of those beautiful eyes, but I think the gold would look better on me, don’t you?”
- while in her other ear, Selar was dangerously close to blowing their cover.
“… curious about the flora and fauna extant in your warm season,” Selar was saying. “The preponderance of calcareous and dolomite rocks in combination with cretaceous sandstones and marls suggests an edaphic ecology dominated by small wildflowers with a very short growing season. Am I correct?”
That’s probably more words than she’s put together since we left Earth! Zetha thought frantically, noticing as Selar did not that some of the citizens were watching her more warily than they had, even with the fear of contagion, on their arrival. What in the name of Gal Gath’thong did she think she was doing? Without thinking, Zetha kicked her sharply on the ankle. The Vulcan did not wince, of course, but she did give Zetha an odd look and, much to her relief, stopped talking.
“Forgive me, Aunt, but all this talk of the warm season, while we and the citizens stand here freezing…. And it’s getting dark….”
“Of course,” Selar said, and they concluded their official business just as the clouds closed overhead and the snows began again.
The beam-out, Sisko thought, was one of the better ones of his career. He managed to pull all three of his charges up to the ship just long enough for Zetha to step down and Tuvok and Selar to seal up their hoods and the masks of their hazmat suits and then, while the citizens of Sawar were still talking among themselves about the goods they had just ordered-to be delivered, they assumed, on the next convoy arriving to take more of their sons and daughters offworld to Romulus-and even the guards patrolling the enclosure were momentarily distracted by the transporter sparkle, he pinpoint-beamed the Vulcans to one of the more abandoned sectors inside the enclosure, where they could do what they had to do.
“Corpses,” Selar reported, shielding her tricorder from the blowing snow with a mittened hand, which also muffled its whirring sounds as she scanned what appeared to be a storehouse of some kind, a heavy lock and chain securing its only door. “Well over one hundred of them, stacked several deep and chemically preserved, presumably until they can be cremated or interred.”
“One would think the cold would be sufficient,” Tuvok remarked, his own tricorder alert for signs of movement in the narrow, high-walled streets, where the wind howled around corners, adding to the chill.
Selar silenced her tricorder. “A charnel house. An attempt to at least contain all the dead in one place. Doubtless waiting until everyone has succumbed before any effort is made toward disposal.”
“Apparently stored here in the earlier stages of the disease,” Tuvok observed, indicating the frozen corpses littering the narrow street before them. “These others were not so fortunate. Can specimens be gathered from the recently dead?”
“Perhaps,” Selar said, kneeling in the snow to examine the two nearest them, an elderly woman and a child wrapped in a final frozen embrace against the perimeter wall. “Ideally, however, those still living would be preferable.”
“But to trouble them when they know that they are dying…” Tuvok suggested. Was it only the cold that made his voice husky?
“Indeed. But if the evidence they provide can prevent further deaths…”
Tuvok frowned. “I would be most interested in ascertaining the identity of the stranger whose arrival coincided with that of the illness. Lieutenant Sisko has us both on locator. I suggest we split up and communicate on discrete.”
“Agreed.”
Once again, Sisko was monitoring life-sign readings and talking to one of the holos. This time it was Uhura.
“Not good news on Jarquin’s sons,” she reported. “Or any Quirinian who