“Throughout the entire Federation?” Crusher marveled. “You have been busy!”

“And—?” Uhura prompted, glancing at the chrono. Selar’s ship would be requesting docking clearance at Spacedock in less than thirty minutes, and they’d have to terminate this meeting beforehand so the discrete would not interfere with ship-to-shore transmissions.

“Two hundred seven cases reporting symptoms such as we have just seen on the Romulan colony, on eighteen Federation worlds and two outposts along the Neutral Zone,” Selar reported. “Given the number of worlds surveyed, there are not many cases, but there have been no survivors. If in fact it is the same entity, the vector is here.”

The map rotated, and a bright red line superimposed itself over known space, connecting the dots on the Federation side. A concomitant green line connected the four Romulan colonies. The two lines stopped at the Neutral Zone, but seemed almost to be reaching toward each other. With a little bit of imagination, one could draw a dotted red and green line, connecting a scattering of inhabited worlds between the two.

“I am continuing to run the algorithm as new case reports come in,” Selar concluded. “However, as of yet I am unable to determine how this has been able to spread among these distant worlds. All persons transporting from ship to ship or ship to surface are screened for disease entities, all goods are irradiated.”

“Not all, Selar,” Crusher said. “Someone got these specimens across the Zone to Admiral Uhura.”

All eyes turned to Uhura. “Only persons or objects passing through a transporter are screened,” she said, and left it at that. “And even that’s about to be remedied.”

“Meanwhile, this thing is spreading!” McCoy voiced what they all feared. He really was too old for this. “Unchecked, it could hopscotch from every world where we’ve found it clear across two quadrants. Even if it doesn’t, it could potentially create panic, put a stop to interplanetary travel, bring commerce to a standstill, quarantine the affected worlds, turn them into charnel houses…”

“Then we’d better get busy,” Uhura said with more enthusiasm than she felt.

“If it is manufactured,” McCoy said, almost to himself. “It will have a signature.”

“A signature?” Uhura echoed him.

“Mad scientists are like mad bombers or computer hack-ers,” he explained, his eyes very far away, as if he were scanning his own personal memory banks for a datum that was just out of reach. “They leave a signature, a calling card, some little sarcastic fillip encoded into the virus that says: ‘This is mine.’ It stokes their egos, makes them feel important…”

He drifted off for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. Finally he said: “You leave this sonofabitch to me. If he’s ever done anything even remotely like this before on any scale, I’ll track him through the database, and I’ll catch him!”

Uhura said nothing, but she knew he knew this was why she’d wanted him on the team.

Crusher was off on her own train of thought. “What I wouldn’t give for one living Romulan to run some background tests on—!” she said.

Uhura’s intercom beeped again. It was Tuvok.

“Sorry to interrupt, Admiral. You said you wanted a preliminary report.”

“I did. Go ahead.”

“Our subject is sleeping at present. The first phase of our interview is concluded.”

“And—?”

“And, as discussed earlier, I believe, as you do, that either she is exactly what she says she is, or she is under such deep cover that, barring a mind-meld, I cannot further confirm her veracity.”

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 tell-tale 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 the past. Tell me everything.”