Possession - J.M. Dillard [108]
“Captain.” With her flowing robes and plaited hair, T’Son seemed a vision from Vulcan’s past; in one arm, she cradled a dimly glowing globe. “Commander.” She nodded at each man in turn as she stepped from the platform.
Picard had never seen such an object before, but he surmised what it was that T’Son held so gently: a vrekatra, a receptacle designed to house a Vulcan’s intelligent essence, a Vulcan’s soul. “If you will follow me, Healer …”
Picard led the way to Skel’s guest quarters.
“Captain,” T’Son said, as they walked, “I have been in contact with the other healers who work with childhood victims of the plague. They are aware of Skel’s unusual ‘carrier’ state, and have examined their patients. None can be found to harbor any entities at all. We will take the plans for the detection device your Mr. Data transmitted to us, and will construct one in order to verify our conclusions. But our current consensus is that Skel was the only child so infected.”
“Well, that is partially a relief, and partially a tragedy,” Picard remarked. She gazed at him silently.
“Healer,” Picard said, “I plan to inform your captain that I will be destroying the entities—all of them. I will not permit them to leave this ship.” He paused, knowing he was violating several protocols and could be disciplined for his action. Beside him, Riker struggled to suppress a smile.
T’Son’s expression remained bland; if the notion disturbed her, she showed no sign. “I did not know they could be destroyed, Captain. How will you accomplish this?”
“Skel’s research has determined that the entities only function as an infectious organism when they are bonded into groups—that is how they infect, feed, and procreate. Mr. Data has formulated a transporter dispersal pattern that will disrupt the frequency that bonds the entities together, so they will be forced into individual units. Data hypothesizes that this individual, harmless state may be their original, natural condition, and that the people who fashioned them into a weapon of war artificially bonded them to do so.”
T’Son considered this in silence; when she did not reply, Picard asked pointedly, “Do you anticipate that your government will protest this decision?”
T’Son permitted herself a small sigh. “It is entirely possible that the entities have an innate intelligence. Victims of the plague spoke of their infection as if another, conscious being was inside them.”
“Our counselor, too, sensed that,” Picard admitted. “But she felt that any intelligence there was a completely malevolent one, totally incompatible with any other life-forms it would encounter.”
“Yet Mr. Data’s solution would merely return them to their natural condition as harmless individual entities,” T’Son said. “It would seem to me that you are simply restoring the natural order, Captain. And the victims have suffered quite enough. I will support your decision before the Vulcan Council.”
“Thank you, Healer.” He bowed.
They stopped before the doors to Skel’s guest quarters, and Picard watched the woman collect her sedate, emotionless demeanor about her like a robe.
“And now it is time for Skel and T’Reth,” she said softly, and moved toward the doors.
Deanna Troi and the entire senior staff—Geordi, Beverly, Will, Worf, Data, and Jean-Luc Picard—stood in the transporter room shoulder-to-shoulder. Alexander was there as well, as was a healthy George Tarmud and a smiling Kyla Dannelke. There was barely room to breathe, but it seemed to Troi that they were all breathing in unison anyway.
On the transporter pad sat the quarantine unit with the two alien artifacts, and all of Data’s containment devices that had trapped every entity infecting the crew.
Skel had opted not to be present; at that moment, Deanna knew, his consciousness was being separated from that of his mother, T’Reth—a woman whose concern for her child had become so desperate that, with her dying breath, she had ejected her katra into Skel’s mind. But because of the entities’ influence, Skel had not realized