“Readout on what?” McCoy demanded, intrigued in spite of himself.

“Medical’s initial analysis of Romulan tissue samples,” Uhura said concisely.

“Did I hear you say ‘Romulan’?”McCoy asked. “My God, that’s not a word I thought I’d hear again within my lifetime! How the hell did you—?”

“Not at liberty to say,” she replied. “Not even on Scramble.”

“That hot, huh?”

I’ve got him!Uhura thought. He can’t resist a mystery. As soon as he sees this data…

“Let’s just say there could be…political ramifications. The colonies affected are very near the Neutral Zone.”

“Cloak and dagger stuff,” McCoy muttered. “Your baili-wick, not mine. All the more reason why my answer’s still no.”

Just then Uhura’s Andorian aide stuck her head through the door, antennae twitching, whispering, “Admiral? You’ll be late.”

Uhura waved her away. “The class is not till 10:00, Thysis. I’ve still got thirty minutes.”

Uhura’s lifelong ambition was to be able to do one thing, just one thing, at a time. As if this were the only crisis on her desk—! As if she didn’t have to monitor hotspots across the quadrant, know the whereabouts of every one of her operatives at any given time, not to mention staying awake at staff meetings and—

“It’s not just the class,” the Andorian hissed. “You have a press conference scheduled beforehand. It was last-minute. I thought you might have forgotten.”

“Leonard, hang on a minute. No, I haven’t forgotten, Thysis. Tell them I’ll be with them in five. Now, shoo! Go away!”

The floss-white head popped back out through the door as quickly as it had popped in.

In those few seconds, McCoy had turned his back to the screen, rummaging for something on a worktable in the background, then returned, pointedly ignoring Uhura, as if that would make her and her troubling news go away. At last she could see what he was doing. He was tying trout flies, one eye half shut, his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.

“You still here?” he demanded at last, tying and snipping, examining the finished product with something like disgust, then scowling at her.

“Rigelian fever can cross species,” was Uhura’s response.

“Wiped out for more than twenty years,” he shot back. “Last known case recorded in 2339. Samples kept in stasis on Starbase 23 just in case. Any new outbreaks, they can replicate a vaccine from there.”

“Worse,” Uhura cajoled him.

“Not interested.” McCoy examined the lure in his hand one more time before rejecting it. “Hands shake too much!” he reported, starting over. “Dammit, you’re ruining my concentration. Go away now. This conversation’s over.” He made shooing motions toward the screen. “Come back when you want to just chat instead of always picking my brains.”

“The Gnawing,” Uhura said.

That got his attention. “Say again?”

“The Gnawing. At least that’s how the translator renders it out of Romulan. Know anything about it?”

“Just rumors. Something Spock said once about…” Uhura watched the transformation on his wily old face. One minute he was blustering, the next he got that kind of glaze-eyed look which meant he was running permutations through his mind, calling upon more than a century of past experience, tempted to get to a lab and start running tests, just as she’d hoped he would be.

“Now, wait just a goddamn minute!” McCoy snapped, breaking the spell. “I know what you’re up to. Trying to reel me in with some rumor about a disease that’s only legend. It won’t work!”

“Apparently it’s not a legend anymore,” Uhura said, coding and scrambling the data-squirt while she talked. Multitasking is my middle name!she thought, sending it before McCoy had a chance to block it. “We have first-person reports of what amounts to a small epidemic. Not in Federation territory. Yet. But it may correlate with something similar that’s crept over to our side. As I mentioned, we do have tissue samples. And I’ve got agents in the field double-checking the veracity of the reports. It’s all there. If you’ll just read what I’m sending you before you—”

“I hear Starfleet Medical’s developing some sort of new-fangled android or hologram or something that’s supposed to replace living beings in high-risk areas…”

How the hell,Uhura wondered, had he found out about the Emergency Medical Hologram project? Starfleet was at least a decade away from so much as a working prototype, and even that was classified. Parsecs from nowhere, Leonard McCoy still heard all the scuttlebutt.

“…get yourselves one of those, you won’t need me!” he finished.

Uhura sat back and waited, casually drumming her perfectly manicured nails on the surface of her desk while her screen bleeped: Message Received.She knew once he read the first few sentences, McCoy’s curiosity would get the better of him. She buzzed Thysis while she waited.

“Tell the media people I’m on my way.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

McCoy never could read as quickly as Spock did, but he skimmed the report, his practiced eyes picking out the pertinent data. Outbreaks of high fever and wasting sickness in Romulan and Federation space, signs and symptoms, failure to respond to standard treatments, mortality rates, projected outcomes if the disease spread unchecked. Uhura almost regretted involving him when at last those tired blue eyes found hers; the look on his face was stricken.

“Where the hell did you get these figures? Especially the Romulan data?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“One hundred percent mortality?” he asked incredulously. “That can’t be accurate. Is this thing bacterial or viral?”

“I don’t know,” was what Dr. Crusher had said after the preliminary lab work. “We don’t know enough about Romulan genetics to distinguish damaged genes from healthy ones. There are some bacteria that can disguise themselves as viruses, and some viruses that can mutate and integrate themselves at the genetic level so they look like a normal part of the DNA sequence.”

She’d tucked a strand of bright red hair behind her ear and sighed in frustration. Uhura could see Dr. Selar nodding agreement.

“As soon as I get readouts on all the samples from the colonies, I’ll compare them,” Crusher said. “But it could be weeks before we can find a match, Admiral, if at all. I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Uhura had replied, not expecting it to be good news, not this soon. “Do your best. There’s someone else I need to talk to in the meantime.”

That was when she called McCoy.

McCoy was talking to himself. “Can’t be bacterial. The bubonic plague by most estimates only killed twenty-five to forty percent of the population of Europe and Asia.” He glared at Uhura, annoyed at being drawn into something she’d known he wouldn’t be able to resist. “Gotta be viral. Even so, those numbers…the Ebola virus’s mortality rate was eighty-eight percent at most, but it was transmitted person-to-person, and it was self-contained. It didn’t go hopping across solar systems.”

“What if it’s airborne?” Uhura asked. She’d been learning more than she wanted to know from Medical ever since this thing first crossed her desk.

“Then the spread would be faster, but mortality would be much lower,” McCoy pointed out. “Ever hear of the Spanish flu?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.”

“Earth, 1918. End of what some historians at the time took to calling the Great War. Now, there’s an oxymoron if there ever was one…”

Uhura glanced at the chrono, trying not to be impatient. Thysis would be back any minute pestering her about the press conference. She could picture the roomful of reporters from half a dozen worlds clearing their alimentary canals and shifting their appendages restlessly.

“…theory is that those who didn’t die in the trenches brought this bug back home with them. Or it could have come from Asia, which is where most flu bugs came from at the time. It killed more people within a year than the Black Death did over several centuries. Lowered the life expectancy in the industrialized world by ten years. People would keel over in the street with a high fever and not last the night.”