And fled the conference, the planet, the Federation in disgrace, some highly virulent Rigelian fever cultures in his baggage.

He’d taken the cultures with him from the family’s private stock when he left home almost as an afterthought; he did not at the time even know why. Officially they did not exist, but the old Rigel families still had their secrets. A wild thought occurred to him afterwards that he might have released the R-virus into the air ducts or slipped it into the cocktail-hour punch and taken out every non-Rigelian at the conference. Too bad, really.

Because he was of the First Families of Rigel, he had his own private ship, and no need to go through transporters or sensors or baggage checks. Which, from what he heard from his sources these days (amid the equipment he had scavenged from his ship and installed in his cave laboratory was a surprisingly powerful transmitter, its signals uncrossed by others, since Renagans no more believed in radio than they did in space travel), was no longer the case. The disease he had created (yes, he, the family idiot, had done this!) was changing the rules. Not so much as a microbe could pass the filtration systems now.

Too late!Thamnos/Cinchona thought almost gleefully, his own internal laughter drowning out the voices of his accusers, at least for a little while. The seeds are already in place, the damage already done. Soon you’ll come to me for your answers, and there will be no jeering then!

He had escaped a universe which knew him as a buffoon, some subconscious survival instinct smarter than he was telling him: Take the fever with you!and he did, changing his name, hiding his ship, and blending in on Renaga. Random chance, perhaps, or maybe something more. Because on Renaga, there was hilopon.And that made all the difference.

It was a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that the natives had used as a folk cure for as long as they could remember, reputed to cure everything from cancer to the clap. Boralesh had taught him how to gather it, how to process and store it, how to apply it to open wounds or tincture it for sore eyes or stomach ailments. Skeptical at first, he had marveled at its all but universal applications, and wondered how it worked.

Then, a true Thamnos, born to privilege and the conviction that the needs of the reigning few precluded any consideration of the masses, he wondered how he might exploit it to his benefit. And when, just out of curiosity, he treated some of the R-fever cultures with it and watched them die before his eyes, he thought he had the answer.

He must make certain no one outside of Renaga ever heard of hilopon.If it truly could cure everything it touched, whoever “discovered” it and brought it to the attention of the universe at large had better make sure he owned all the rights to it beforehand. But how to do that on a world where hiloponwas, quite literally, as cheap as dirt? As he tinkered with the substance in his laboratory cave, that one mystery eluded him. And there were other forces at work around him that, short-sighted as he was, eluded his notice as well.

Backward and lacking in resources though it might be, Renaga had its attractions for those whose empire flourished on conquest. Romulan eyes are far-seeing, and while it is assumed that they usually prefer the military solution, sometimes subtler methods are employed. Romulans are long-lived as well, and there are some who will accept as their duty to the Empire the assignment to infiltrate other worlds, go to ground for decades if necessary, and await instructions.

Thamnos was not the only outworlder on Renaga.

“So what makes you think this Thamnos character is behind our neoform?” Crusher asked. “The man you’re describing would hardly have the skills to create something this sophisticated.”

“Probably not on purpose,” McCoy acknowledged. “But if he somehow got his hands on the Romulan Gnawing and grafted it onto certain strains of Rigelian fever…”

“Indeed,” Selar said after a thoughtful silence.

Uhura frowned, scanning her memory for what she knew about Rigelian fever, which wasn’t much. “What’s so special about Rigelian fever?”

“Selar?” McCoy said.

“There are five known strains of Rigelian or R-fever,” Selar explained. “The penultimate strain, R4b, can mutate into two separate strains, R4b1 and R4b2. Of those, R4b2, when acting as a host virus, could potentially cause multiple mutations if grafted onto certain other viruses with similar hydrogen-chain configurations. There have been no known cases of R-fever reported since 2339; therefore, the disease is studied as an artifact in most medical schools, but not in any detail. I should have known better.”

“Don’t worry,” McCoy tweaked her. “We won’t report you to the Vulcan Perfectionists’ Association.”

“With all due respect, Dr. McCoy,” Selar shot right back. “Were there such an entity, it need only be called the Vulcan Association, to avoid redundancy.”

“Okay, people, as you were,” Uhura said. She’d been running a search on Thamnos from the data McCoy provided while they spoke. “Leonard, one question. I’ll grant you a Rigelian might have access to stores of R-fever virus concealed somewhere in their system. The Orion Syndicate still has ties there, even today. But what makes you think Thamnos in particular? Dr. Crusher’s right; he doesn’t seem to have accomplished much in his career.”

“Well, aside from the fact that no one’s seen hide nor hair of him since the Bendii incident, you’ll notice there’s a year missing in the reportings from his private laboratory.”

“And—?”

“What your reports don’t tell you is that the lab, paid for out of Daddy’s pocket, was shut down by the Rigelian government for about a year due to sloppy work habits and—get this—‘questionable practice in the use of strains of R4b2.’ Rumor has it those questionable practices included trying to breed a species of hare that would carry R-fever without succumbing to it. Thamnos’s argument when he was brought up on charges was that he was trying to create a model to be used in testing, but the authorities suspected it was a not-so-clever attempt to infiltrate rival labs with these animals and contaminate their data. He was only let off because the experiment was a total failure. He’d neglected to consider that Rigelian hares can’t be infected with R-fever.”

“And just where did you get that information?” Uhura demanded.

“Not gonna tell you!” McCoy said. “You protect your sources, I protect mine.”

“All the same,” Crusher was still skeptical. “If he’s such a bumbler, how could he possibly—”

“He may be a bumbler, but someone else out there might not be,” Uhura suggested. “Someone from the Romulan side.”

“With access to Gnawing cultures,” Selar suggested. “And enough medical knowledge—”

“Or access to a pool of medical and bio-warfare experts,” Uhura interjected. “Leonard, where are you going?”

“Time to make a few house calls…” He drifted out of range of the holotransceivers and for the moment Uhura let him go.

“I’ll need access to live R-fever,” Crusher said.

“I’m on it,” Uhura said, calling up access codes for Starbase 23, and seeing what ships were in the vicinity that could be diverted to act as couriers.

In the living quarters of the Albatross,the others watched and listened to the medical briefing. Sisko was clearing the dishes away. Tuvok was simultaneously scanning the buzz of communications above Tenjin, monitoring the holo communicator to make certain there was no leakage, and tending to his prize orchid. Zetha slipped away to prep the lab for Selar, one ear on the transmission.

“Speaking of mutations,” Crusher was saying. “The majority of them turned out to be red herrings. They replicated for a while, then died off. Of course, we wasted days isolating and monitoring them, which may have been part of the design. But if we can verify that they were caused by R-fever, we’ll know which ones to pay attention to in the future.”