Nyota took one deep breath and calmed herself, drawing herself up to her full height, looking very serious. “They were kissing,”she reported, saying the word with a frissonof intermingled disgust and delight.
“And you were spying on them,” her grandfather suggested.
“I was not!” she said, indignant at the very thought. She settled herself on the bench beside the old man, legs swinging, confident he would protect her. “I was only climbing the old mangrove tree. They just happened to be kissing under it.”
“The same place they go every afternoon, and you know it,” the old man said dryly. “You were spying. So. What happened?”
“The branch I was sitting on started to crack. I was falling, but I caught myself. I wasn’t hurt, but they heard the snap and they saw me. Malaika was laughing so hard she fell off the big root where they were sitting. But Juma said he was going to get me. So I ran.”
“Ah, I see,” the old man said, just as the young couple emerged from the bush, holding hands and laughing, and looking not at all as if they were chasing anyone.
Most of the year, Nyota lived with her parents in Mombasa, a coastal city of high-rises and traffic and noise, where her entire childhood was regimented into school and after-school and music and dance lessons and swimming classes and gymnastics and languages, and it was only during the height of the January heat, just after her birthday and the holidays, when her parents packed her off to the country for a month to be with her grandparents and a raft of cousins, that she felt truly free. The happiest memories of her childhood were here.
But Babu was right; she had been curious from the day she was born.
“You’re a terror, you!” the old man told her more than once. “Tumbiri,monkey-child, climbing trees and spying through windows and listening on the stairs. Asking questions ever since you could talk. ‘Why, Babu, why?’ You are uhuru.Independent. Free as the wind and completely untamed. But someday your spying is going to get you into trouble, and I may not be around to save you…”
She was the same age now that Babu had been then, Uhura realized with a start, hoping the lapse had only been in her mind and not something the reporters might have noticed. They were still smiling up at her expectantly.
“I have an idea!” she announced, as if it were something that had just occurred to her, and not the same suggestion she made at the end of the press conference—she could see the veterans already nodding—every year. “How would you all like to sit in on my class this morning?
“It’s called Communications 101,” she explained, leading them down the corridors. “It’s been called that since the Academy was founded. When I took over, the deans suggested I could change it to whatever I wanted, but I’ve kept the designation. After all, if you think about it, the secret to understanding the universe is communication…”
Just this mission and then no more,she thought, the disease vectors she’d passed on to McCoy still active in her mind, resonating with visions of death and more death. Because if in fact my source inside the Empire is correct and this is not a natural phenomenon, but something someone has created for whatever hideous reasons, and if I and my “shadow people” can’t resolve it, it could be yet another excuse for war.
I went into intelligence work for one reason only, because I believe that the military solution must be the last and not the first choice. This has always been my philosophy both as a Starfleet officer and as a private person. Consequently I must use all the Starfleet resources at my disposal to try to stop this thing before it’s too late!
Chapter 2
When Crusher had completed the first round of tests at Uhura’s request, she had asked the same thing McCoy would ask a few days later. “Where did these tissue samples come from?”
“Inside the Romulan Empire,” was all Uhura said.
“How did—?” Crusher started to say, then realized she wouldn’t get an answer. She thought of a different question. “How can you be sure they’re genuine?”
“I trust the source. I’ve also got my Listeners trying to get confirmation.”
Uhura’s Listeners were many and varied, the backbone of Intelligence under her command, from sleepers who committed themselves to a lifetime on the inside—Vulcans passing as Romulans, humans surgically altered to resemble a dozen other species that bore watching—to troubleshooters thrown into crises while they were happening, who landed on their feet and did their best at damage control, to dozens of communications officers on Starfleet ships flung across the quadrant who, in between their assigned duties, monitored every stray frequency that passed through their consoles, listening for…anything. A sudden flurry of trade agreements in an Orion-controlled sector which meant the pirates were smuggling arms again, a rumor that a Coridan ambassador’s death by food poisoning might not have been food poisoning at all but a carefully planned assassination or, now, a tale from the heart of the Empire of a disease thought all but eradicated a thousand years ago which in its latest incarnation killed everyone in its path—there was little that escaped the eyes and ears of the Listeners, even after half a century of “official” silence.
While Crusher had been running preliminary tests, Uhura had been fielding any number of transmissions that began with “Admiral, this might not mean anything, but…” Her job was to pull all the strands together and weave them into a tapestry of information that presented a coherent picture, however long it took.
“Is there enough there to go on?” she asked Crusher now.
“I don’t know yet,” Crusher said. “The tests I’ve run so far indicate this thing is particularly virulent. And it doesn’t respond to antibiotics, known antiviral agents, or even household bleach. Radiation will kill it back temporarily, but only in amounts that would kill the patient. Turn the radiation off and the bug regenerates.”
“Is there anything you can do?” Uhura asked.
“I’ll need to grow a big enough batch of it in culture to run some more tests. If we had time, we could work on cracking the genetic code, then developing an antigene to combat this.”
“What kind of time are we talking about?”
Crusher shrugged. “Weeks, maybe months, maybe not at all without samples from healthy Romulans to compare this with.”
“Could you compare what you’ve got with samples from similar species?” Uhura asked. “Rigelians, let’s say, or Vulcans?”
“Theoretically I could compare normal specimens from any vulcanoid species with the disease specimens, but the match wouldn’t be exact,” Crusher said. “Romulans, I gather, from what little there is in the databanks, are different. And I’m still not clear on why I’m doing this.”
“Need to know, Doctor. I can’t tell you that now, but it’s urgent. Can you give me an ETA on when you’ll have those additional tests completed?”
“As soon as I can get this thing to grow in culture,” Crusher responded. “Even I can’t hurry Mother Nature.”
“Keep me informed,” Uhura said, and moved on.
Something one learned as a comm officer in a crisis was what Uhura called operational triage. Overwhelmed with multiphasic transmissions and often under fire, you had to decide in a heartbeat which messages were most important. Very often the voices yelling the loudest were the ones you could most safely ignore. It was the whispers you had to pay attention to.