Chapter 5

“Okay, what have we got?” McCoy demanded, rubbing his hands together, exhilarated by the chase in spite of himself.

“A bug of unknown etiology which can affect humans and Vulcans, kills everyone it infects, and may have been artificially created,” Crusher reported grimly.

“And a possible disease vector,” Selar chimed in from aboard the science vessel whose ETA at Spacedock was 1900 hours that evening.

“This is new,” Uhura said from the center seat. “Let’s hear it.”

She had “assembled” all three of them in a holoconference in her office. Each of them, wherever they were, experienced the presence of the other three in situ.This level of holo technology was not yet Fleet standard, but was something Uhura, working with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, had been instrumental in developing. It not only gave the impression that she and the three doctors were actually, three-dimensionally present in four locations at once, but the transmission frequencies were virtually impenetrable by at least current Starfleet technology. At the moment the prototype could be transmitted only from her office at SI, though she knew that some of the newer starships were being fitted with holodecks employing the same principles.

For now, Crusher, looking tired but no less groomed in her characteristic blue smock, her waves of bright red hair barely contained in a practical ponytail at the nape of her neck, had arranged three empty chairs in a clear space between the countertops and autoclaves in her lab at Medical HQ. Dr. Selar, for her part, had arranged some low couches in a space in her vessel’s sickbay, confident that, on a Vulcan ship, neither she nor the confidentiality of the meeting would be disturbed.

McCoy, in his favorite rocker on the porch of a retreat so remote only Intelligence had been able to track him down, was enjoying the company of three beautiful women seated in a semicircle of cushioned Adirondack chairs on his back lawn, under a starlit sky and accompanied by the sound of crickets. Uhura, hosting all three of them in her office had, just to be whimsical, seated his flannel-shirt-and-old-Levi’s incarnation on a windowsill overlooking San Francisco Bay, where the sun was starting its late-afternoon slide down the sky beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. McCoy had refused to shave for the occasion and, with his tousled white hair and three-day stubble, looked like nothing so much as a wild-eyed mountain man.

“First things first!” he blustered now. “We’ve got to know what this thing is before we start trying to figure out where it came from.”

Uhura shot him a Who’s in charge here?look and turned to Crusher. “Dr. Crusher, you have the floor.”

“Right.” She took a deep breath and began. “Assuming this is actually a variant of the disease the Romulans call the Gnawing, its original source is a naturally occurring bacterium found in the soil of the Romulan homeworld.

“Bacteria, for our purposes, Admiral, are ‘big’ germs, easy to see under a microscope, fairly easy to kill. Just for show and tell, I’ll give you some examples….”

Three images, projected from a fifth locus of the holoprogram, materialized in the middle of their field of vision. Each was about a foot high and floated in mid-air; each was a many-times magnified three-dimensional realization of what would be visible under a microscope. One was a bright red-orange podlike shape containing five orange ovules that could have been peas or soybeans but, in fact, as the readout beside it attested, were the spores of botulism. The second, a methane-blue sphere with a fluid, coruscated surface, from which smaller, seedlike purplish spheres were escaping like solar flares, identified itself as bubonic plague. The third and central one featured scatterings of purple rods like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone, though with the characteristic drumstick knob at one end which identified the “sprinkles” as tetanus. As Crusher spoke, the images pirouetted slowly to 360 degrees and back again, displaying themselves in all their deadly glory.

Uhura, to whom this was all new, watched transfixed. The others, who had seen these maleficences and others before, still found them strangely compelling. When she thought they’d seen enough, Crusher made all but the tetanus image vanish, and brought up a new image whose “drumsticks,” interspersed with vague, shapeless blotches, looked very similar to the tetanus, except that they were yellowish-brown in color.

“What you’re looking at here,” Crusher said, “is a specimen, taken from the locket Admiral Uhura delivered to Starfleet Medical yesterday, of something that we have been told is killing Romulans on some of their colony worlds, and which may be related to the historic Romulan plague known as the Gnawing. If this is in fact the same entity, it’s very much like tetanus and, like tetanus, it’s a killer, a killer that can lie dormant for decades, even centuries, until the soil is disturbed by plowing or building roads, or even by a child playing in the dirt. And, like tetanus, the original form is only dangerous if ingested or if it infiltrates an open wound. It’s not contagious. It can’t be passed from person to person like a head cold.”

“Further,” Selar chimed in. “It would be most unlikely for an identical bacterium to be found in the soil of as many different planets, spread across as wide a region of space, as have thus far yielded casualties of this disease. The bacterium that resulted in the Gnawing has thus far never been found on any world other than Romulus.”

“With you so far,” Uhura said, hearing a resonance of the shared Vulcan/Romulan it-is-not-a-lie-to-keep-the-truth-to-oneself behind Selar’s words. Later she would take Selar aside privately and ask her how much she’d known about the Gnawing, and from what sources, before this. But now was not the time. “But if it’s not contagious, how did it kill up to fifty percent of the population of Romulus nearly two thousand years ago?”

“We do not know that for certain, Admiral,” Selar said. “History is often replete with exaggeration.”

“Nevertheless, Selar, it did kill enough people to make it into the histories. I can’t believe they all contracted it from soil samples.”

“There might have been an airborne version,” Crusher suggested. “Which might have been contagious, transmitted by a cough or sneeze. As could an animal-to-Romulan form, like the bubonic plague on Earth, which was transmitted from rat to flea to human. Or by eating the meat of an infected animal. While we know that Vulcans post-Surak generally don’t eat meat, modern Romulans do.”

No one actually looked to Selar for confirmation or denial. The question, like the holos, hung in the air unanswered.

“Even so,” Crusher said after an uncomfortable silence. “Bacteria, as I say, are incredibly easy to kill. If that was all we had here, we could develop a vaccine from the killed strains, inoculate anyone in a hot zone, maybe share the vaccine with the Romulans as a good-will gesture, problem solved. But…”

With the flick of a toggle, she made the tetanus bacillus vanish and moved the Gnawing bacillus to one side.

“Some bacteria can mutate into viruses, which is what we think was the case with the prototypical Gnawing,” she said as several new images slowly materialized. “We can only conjecture, because we don’t have records from the pandemic two thousand years ago. And I imagine it might be very difficult to send someone to Romulus to gather soil samples in remote areas in the hopes of finding an unadulterated cluster of Gnawing microbes.”

Difficult,Uhura thought, but probably not impossible.She had in fact sent one of her Listeners to do just that, but the Listener had not yet reported back.