“Which sounds very much like what we’re dealing with here,” Uhura suggested. “And that’s exactly why we need your help.”

McCoy ignored that last remark. “Except that the mortality rate for that particular strain of flu—which thank God was never replicated, at least not on Earth—was only 2.5 percent. Millions of people got sick, but most of them recovered. Even in 1918, with no vaccines or even palliative treatments like antibiotics. Not that antibiotics work against a viral infection, but—”

“Leonard, this is fascinating, but—”

“—but I’m dithering, and you’ve got work to do,” he finished for her. “All I’m saying is you can’t have every single one of your patients dying from a possibly viral, possibly airborne infection. Either this isn’t viral or these numbers are wrong.”

“Then help me make them right,” Uhura challenged him.

“A one hundred percent mortality rate?” McCoy was talking to himself again. Uhura sighed. She’d wanted him onboard, but wished he’d get off the pot. “No response to treatment, and across species? How do you know these numbers from inside the Zone are accurate? And why are you in charge of this instead of Starfleet Medical?”

Good thing this is a secured frequency,Uhura thought. It was past time for her to take control of this conversation.

“Are you finished?” she asked quietly. “The reason this was brought to my attention…” Well, not the entire reason,she thought, but he doesn’t need to know that now, if at all.“…is because—and Leonard, we never had this conversation—those numbers suggest that whatever this is, bacterial or viral, airborne or direct contact, it’s not a natural phenomenon. That it’s been manufactured, either by the Romulans or by someone from our side. It’s my job to figure that out before this becomes more than just a particularly nasty flu bug killing a few thousand people on a half-dozen worlds and becomes an Interstellar Incident, uppercase. It’s your job, if you decide that saving lives is more important than trout fishing, to assist my medical team with the microscopic stuff, lowercase.”

“If you’d—” McCoy started to say, but Uhura rode right over him. She was slow to anger, but once there, she was dangerous.

“I’ve got two of the best MDs in the fleet doing the lab work, agents in place on the other side attempting to confirm the reports of outbreaks there, and I’m gathering a team to go in and investigate this on the ground. But nobody has the decades of experience you have, and Dr. Crusher asked for you specifically…”

Thysis’s antennaed head appeared in the doorway again; she heard the tone in the admiral’s voice, and vanished again without a sound. If Uhura had so much as noticed her, she gave no sign.

“I’m not asking you to go hopping galaxies, just to consult,” she told McCoy, building to a crescendo. “And if you’re going to balk, I’ll get someone else. Someone probably not as good as you, but a lot more cooperative. I do not have the time or the patience to coddle your ego or put up with your carefully nurtured idiosyncrasies. Now, are you in or are you out?”

There was a long moment of silence while McCoy waited for her to cool off.

“Are youfinished?” he asked carefully. It wasn’t everyone who could bite his head off from across the quadrant.

“Yes, I am.”

“Tell me about the tissue samples,” he said doggedly. “What kind of tissue samples, and from where?”

“I’d rather not discuss that unless I’m sure you’re in.” She knew that would get a rise out of him.

“Are you saying you don’t trust me?” he demanded.

“You know, you’re probably right,” she said, suddenly changing course, pretending she hadn’t heard him, shuffling datachips on her desk, watching him out of the corner of her eye. “Someone younger, more up-to-date on current pandemic management techniques, would probably be a better choice.”

She saw his ears perk up at the word “younger.”

“Someone who?” McCoy demanded. “These youngsters today can’t be bothered doing hands-on lab work. They think you just push a button and the computer does everything for you. This thing I’m looking at here isn’t going to yield to that kind of slapdash technique. There are times when a good, old-fashioned empirical approach—”

“Leonard, I’m sorry, I’ve got a press conference,” Uhura cut him off. “It would have been great to have you on board to help us stop this thing a little sooner, maybe save a few extra lives, but I’ll tell Beverly you’re not available for consult. She did say you were one of her role models in med school, and she was hoping you’d help fill in the gaps in her knowledge. She’ll be disappointed, but never mind. Sorry to have bothered you. Uhura out.”

“Beverly?” McCoy ruminated, not noticing that Uhura hadn’t closed the frequency yet. “I wonder—? No, couldn’t be the same one. You might recall I gave a series of guest lectures at the Academy a few years back. So well attended Command asked me to do it again the following year. Told them no, too. Nobody listens.”

Yes, I do remember,Uhura thought. It’s part of my job to forget nothing.

“There was this sweet young thing who cornered me after the first lecture, asked me questions for about an hour. Got shipped out and couldn’t attend the rest of the series, though. Pity. Stunning-looking woman. Tall drink of water, legs up to here, flaming red hair…wanted to do more than just teachher anatomy, I can tell you. Young enough to be my granddaughter, but there’s something about redheads…”

While he was woolgathering, Uhura had sent him Crusher’s holo on a quick squirt.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” McCoy said as the picture arrived, genuine pleasure lighting his face for the first time. “There she is! Her name was Howard back then, though. Beverly Howard. I remember now. Married, I suppose.”

“Widowed,” Uhura reported. “With a young son. I’ll send her and Dr. Selar your regrets.”

“You’ve got Selar on this, too? Now, her I know by reputation. Wouldn’t mind sharpening my wits against a Vulcan’s again. It’s been way too long.” McCoy frowned. He suddenly realized he’d just been dismissed. “Wait a minute. Do you want my help on this or not?”

“Yes, repeat: No.” Uhura said, throwing his own words back at him.

“You said I can consult on remote.”

“Correct.”

“Don’t have to leave my front porch.”

“Affirmative.”

“Get to interact with bright, attractive women and maybe save a few lives in the bargain.”

“Affirmative.”

“You’ve talked me into it.”

Uhura gifted him with one of her dazzling smiles. “Welcome aboard!”

Only after she’d closed the frequency did she let her face relax and show what she was truly feeling, which was a bone-deep exhaustion. This mission had occupied her attention 24/7 ever since Cretak’s message had reached her from inside the Empire. In that time she’d done all the things she’d just told McCoy—put the medical team to work, gotten through to her operatives inside the Empire with instructions to track down every rumor of unusual illness anywhere in Romulan space, and scanned her files to determine who she had available to send into the Neutral Zone for what could at best be an exercise in futility, and at worst mean a death sentence.

Because if this was just some unusual bug, the potential was bad enough. But if, as her source suggested, it was an artifical pathogen designed to kill everyone it affected, the potential was too horrific to contemplate.

It had been almost fifty years since the infamous Tomed Incident, fifty years in which Empire and Federation had turned their backs on each other, shunned each other, withdrawn their diplomatic embassies from each other’s soil, and metaphorically glared across parsecs of space at each other in stony silence, neither side willing to take the step across the void that separated them and start again.