Before Tuvok could ask the question, he gave him an answer.

“My educated guess is those ’craft are built for atmosphere, not vacuum. I just want to get high enough up to where they can’t follow us, and then we’ll go looking for our runaway. Shields up,” he announced just as one of the hovercraft fired another shot. The shields took it with only a little protest, though Sisko could feel the drain as if it were he and not the ship who’d been hit.

“Shields down to sixty-eight percent, recharging,” Tuvok reported smoothly.

“Can’t wait for it,” Sisko announced. The engines were fully online now. He opened the intraship to warn Selar in the lab. “Hang onto anything breakable, Doctor. We’re out of here!”

With that he activated the forward thrusters and threw the big bird into reverse. She slid abruptly backward to hover above the raging sea, buffeted by the wind sheer until Sisko reversed thrusters and, like her namesake, her cumbersome shape defied gravity and soared upward, over the heads of the disappointed hovercraft, and away.

Comm was crackling furiously. Since Sisko was occupied, Tuvok monitored. A jumble of cross talk greeted him, Sliwoni authorities arguing with their attackers, who were arguing back.

“Some are insisting that they should let us go and good riddance,” Tuvok reported. “Others want to imprison us on charges of bioterrorism. A third group insists they should have destroyed us while we were still on the ground.” He closed the channel with something like a sigh. “By the time they finish arguing among themselves, we will be well away. Can you accurately pinpoint one Romulan life-form reading within ten kilometers of the clearing?”

“Assuming she’s still within ten kilometers of the clearing, and assuming she’s the only Romulan within ten kilometers of the clearing…” Sisko muttered, scanning. “Sliwoni have their own distinct signature, but given the interplanetary population, I’m also reading non-Romulan humanoids, what could be Rigelians and…hello.”

The scanner indicated one vulcanoid reading, in the very same thicket from which the archers had attacked, as if Zetha were crouched and watching the hovercraft circle the now empty clearing with something like futility, wondering what she should do next.

“I guess she’s completed whatever errand took her into town,” Sisko said half to himself.

Tuvok raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

“Lowering shields,” Sisko said, “and activating transporter.”

A rather breathless and disheveled Zetha waited for the decon beam before hopping off the pad, something hidden in her jacket.

“I tried to get back before they attacked, but they cut me off,” she reported, as if it had all been part of some plan. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

She reached inside her jacket and presented Sisko with a reasonably new adapter that, with slight modifications, would be exactly what he needed.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, not sure if he was annoyed because she’d been able to find it or because he’d been so impatient with her questions about it in the first place.

“What difference does it make?” Zetha asked. “Does it fit? I know it works.”

“What do you mean, you know it works? You stole this, didn’t you?”

“I scrounged it. Stole it, if you prefer. Its previous owner has an entire warehouse of them, and if it works, it will help us, will it not?”

Sisko opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“Would it comfort you if I told you I meant to barter for it, but when I heard all the uproar in town I didn’t have time?”

“Barter with what?” Sisko demanded. “You don’t have anything worth bartering for!”

He regretted it the minute he said it but, as usual, Zetha took no offense.

“Well, there you are,” she said with her characteristic shrug.

“Thank you,” he told Zetha tightly. “I’ll deal with this later. For now…” The hovercraft were dispersing, but who knew how long it would be before official sources tried to intervene? “…we’re getting the hell out of here.”

When at last they were well away from Sliwon and Sisko had repaired to the engine room, it was Tuvok’s turn. “How did you manage not only to slip into town undetected, but to steal the adapter and elude pursuit on your return?”

Zetha’s smile came more readily now. “Sisko thinks I’m a spy. So, in your heart, still, do you.”

“Yet you claim you are not.”

“I’m small, I’m fast. I’ve been told all my life that I’m invisible, that I do not exist. Who’s to say it isn’t true?”

Aft in the engine room running a diagnostic on the environmental controls, Sisko was shaking his head. “Well, I’ll be damned! I don’t believe for a minute that this was the only errand that took you to town, but at least the darn thing works….”

“It’s continuing to spread,” Crusher informed Selar. “Twenty-seven planets and five starbases affected. Outbreaks confirmed on seven freighters and two science vessels, and we’re following other reports. Still one hundred percent mortality in those affected. We can give palliative treatment to ease the symptoms in the final hours, but we’ve had no luck cracking the code on this thing. And we still haven’t a clue to how it’s spread.”

“Giving further credence to the Typhoid Mary theory,” was Selar’s opinion.

“So it seems,” Crusher said. “And yet, the Romulan on Quirinus tested clean. What’s the word on Sliwon?”

Selar told her what she’d found. “As expected, air, water, and soil samples tested negative. Native flora and fauna, also negative. As for the putative cure…”

“The stuff you confiscated in the marketplace,” Crusher said. “What do you make of it?”

“Structurally intriguing, but essentially inert.”

Crusher sat back in her chair, hands in her pockets. She’d hailed Uhura and McCoy, but neither had reported in yet. Well, she could give them a précis later. “Structurally intriguing? I’m listening.”

“At the molecular level, it would appear to be a levorotatory form of the Gnawing bacillus,” Selar began. Suddenly McCoy popped into view beside Crusher. A human might have been startled, but Selar merely waited for him to say what he would inevitably feel compelled to say.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Within 99.997 percent of certainty, Doctor, yes.”

The old man’s eyes lit up. “That’s wonderful news! We could be talking about a potential treatment, or at least a decoy. Same principle behind ryetalin treatment for Rigelian fever.”

“I’m afraid it is not that simple,” Selar said quietly, and suddenly Uhura was with them, too.

“Wait a minute. Back up and explain this for the layman, please.”

“She means ‘in English,’ ” McCoy supplied. Crusher suppressed a smile. Selar’s news was making them all a little giddy; it was the first ray of hope in a long time.

Selar activated a holoprogram. “We are all by now familiar with the Gnawing, as seen at the molecular level,” she said, as the image rotated before them. “This,” she said, calling up a second shape, “is hilopon,its mirror image, the substance Lieutenant Tuvok confiscated from the individual in the Sliwoni market.

“As you can see, the same number of molecules, in the same order, is present. But in the Gnawing, the genetic helix rotates to the right, whereas the hiloponspiral rotates to the left. Thus levo—from the Latin, meaning ‘left’—rotatory, or turning in the familiar helical configuration.”

“So this could be a potential cure?” Uhura asked, not daring to hope.

“Not exactly,” McCoy butted in before Selar could speak. “Since you’re not dealing with the pure Gnawing, but with the Catalyst neoform, which has been grafted onto Rigelian fever. But Rigelian fever’s curable with ryetalin, which is what I started to tell you about. But I’m sure with a little ingenuity we could design a cocktail of the two compounds, a little one-two punch that’d knock this damn disease right out of business.”