“Citizen Jarquin has made us aware of your situation—” Tuvok began, but the woman interrupted him.

“My name is Subhar. I am magistrate here,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Ordinarily I’d invite you into the warmth of my house to conduct your business. But even as we speak, some of our most esteemed citizens are dying without remedy behind that wall…”

She nodded toward the end of the street, where the landing party could see that part of an ancient wall that had no doubt once encircled the first settlement here had recently been haphazardly bricked up once again. What looked like electrified wire topped the hasty two-meters-tall construct, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter.

“…so we will conduct our business outdoors, where the fresh air at least gives us a fighting chance against contagion.”

Subhar seemed to be struggling to maintain her composure. The landing party said nothing as she blinked back tears before they froze in her eyes.

“I didn’t want you here,” she snapped. “It seemed…in-appropriate. But we need the replicator parts, and one of my advisors…” She indicated a gray-haired elder, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his parka, who merely nodded in acknowledgment. “…reminded me that our future will not always be about death. So far no one outside the wall has gotten ill. This was what we did in ancient times, and it seems to have been effective. Some have said it’s barbaric, but what else could we do? We have contained the damnable thing, and we will need bright colors in order to celebrate the lives of those who died, after we have mourned their deaths. So you see why we must be wary of strangers, even though bearing official approvals,” Subhar concluded, her anger and sorrow having given way to a kind of weariness. “It was a stranger who brought the illness.”

“A stranger?” Tuvok dared after what he hoped was a suitable silence.

“He said he was from Qant Prefecture, but his accent gave him away. Clearly he was lying, but lying’s not a crime, not yet. After this, it might be. We never did find out where he really came from. By the time we investigated, the first casualties were already affected. He had no identification on him when we searched him.”

“What became of him?” Tuvok asked.

“Oh,” Subhar said, as if it were an afterthought. “We killed him.”

Tuvok reacted to this as a Romulan might, which was to say not at all. “Then he did not succumb to the illness?”

“No. But it wasn’t here before he came, and once we contained everyone he’d come in contact with behind the wall, no one else got sick. And now you’ve asked enough questions, Citizen. Show us your samples, and let’s be done with it. This weather won’t hold for long.”

As if on cue, the sun disappeared behind a fast-moving cloud, and the wind picked up. Motioning her visitors toward the news kiosk, where a counter was cleared for them to set their rucksacks down, Subhar and the townspeople gathered around, though careful that none of them touched their visitors or anything they had brought with them.

“It’s hit the fan,” Crusher told Uhura. “I’ve just received a memo from the C-in-C wanting to know what the hell—and I’m quoting here—kind of progress we were or were not making on this disease. Which, by the way, I’m told they’ve code-named Catalyst.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Doctor,” Uhura said wearily. “I’ve gotten the same memo.”

“The news media’s suggesting every rash or runny nose could be evidence of germ warfare. They’re quoting numbers in the millions.”

“At least we aren’t!” Uhura said a little more sharply than she’d intended. “Yet. I’ve got a press conference this afternoon to try to do some damage control. Can you give me a bone to throw them?”

“Nothing I’d want getting out to the public at large,” Crusher said, tossing her bright hair over her shoulders. “And, off the record, we’ll never develop a serum against something where everyone dies.”

Uhura thought of everything she’d learned about viruses in recent weeks. “Which leaves the genetic route.”

“Hypothetically,” Crusher said. “We finished mapping the human genome in the early twenty-first century. The Vulcans, not surprisingly, had their genetic codes down centuries earlier, and the Romulans probably have as well. There are some genes that all three species have in common, but—”

“Go on,” Uhura prompted.

“But a retrovirus that can infiltrate all three species at the genetic level, particularly one that mutates the way this one does…well, it took thirteen years to map the human genome. It took longer than that to cure HIV at the genetic level, even when we knew exactly what it looked like. This is more like cracking secret codes than practicing medicine.”

“So even if the away team succeeds in tracing this to the Romulan side…”

“There might be some political value in pointing out that they created it, but unless they’ve also got a cure up their sleeves, it’s not going to save any lives.”

“Political value in the negative sense,” Uhura mused. “A chance to let slip the dogs of war on both sides.” She shook her head. “Not if I can help it. I’ll give the C-in-C the same sweet talk I give the press. You get back to work.”

“Yes, sir,” Crusher said.

Despite the citizens’ unease over the deaths behind the wall, the “Romulan merchants” were doing good business. Zetha faithfully recorded several orders for Tholian silk, aware that in the corner of her eye Tuvok was assessing the wall, the guards, the odds of successfully infiltrating the enclosure. In one ear, a Quirinian matron was asking her whether she personally would choose the gold print or the green—

“Well, I’m assuming green for you, dear, because of those beautiful eyes, but I think the gold would look better on me, don’t you?”

—while in her other ear, Selar was dangerously close to blowing their cover.

“…curious about the flora and fauna extant in your warm season,” Selar was saying. “The preponderance of calcareous and dolomite rocks in combination with cretaceous sandstones and marls suggests an edaphic ecology dominated by small wildflowers with a very short growing season. Am I correct?”

That’s probably more words than she’s put together since we left Earth!Zetha thought frantically, noticing as Selar did not that some of the citizens were watching her more warily than they had, even with the fear of contagion, on their arrival. What in the name of Gal Gath’thong did she think she was doing? Without thinking, Zetha kicked her sharply on the ankle. The Vulcan did not wince, of course, but she did give Zetha an odd look and, much to her relief, stopped talking.

“Forgive me, Aunt, but all this talk of the warm season, while we and the citizens stand here freezing…. And it’s getting dark….”

“Of course,” Selar said, and they concluded their official business just as the clouds closed overhead and the snows began again.

The beam-out, Sisko thought, was one of the better ones of his career. He managed to pull all three of his charges up to the ship just long enough for Zetha to step down and Tuvok and Selar to seal up their hoods and the masks of their hazmat suits and then, while the citizens of Sawar were still talking among themselves about the goods they had just ordered—to be delivered, they assumed, on the next convoy arriving to take more of their sons and daughters offworld to Romulus—and even the guards patrolling the enclosure were momentarily distracted by the transporter sparkle, he pinpoint-beamed the Vulcans to one of the more abandoned sectors inside the enclosure, where they could do what they had to do.

“Corpses,” Selar reported, shielding her tricorder from the blowing snow with a mittened hand, which also muffled its whirring sounds as she scanned what appeared to be a storehouse of some kind, a heavy lock and chain securing its only door. “Well over one hundred of them, stacked several deep and chemically preserved, presumably until they can be cremated or interred.”