Spock entered, but he said, “Thank you, Doctor. I prefer to stand.” And then he said, “An.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The correct phrase is ‘an historic occasion.’” The Vulcan’s expression was completely serious; McCoy glared at him, searching for a glimmer of humor beneath the mask.
Unable to find one, he said, “Forget I ever said it. Just get to this favor, will you?”
“Very well. I would like you to run some lab tests.”
McCoy raised a brow. “You feeling poorly?”
“Not at all. I’d like for you to culture the virus in my blood to see how it affects Vulcans.”
“I assume you’re talking about a sample of blood, not what’s circulating around your body at the moment.”
“Precisely.”
McCoy leaned back in his chair. “Chances are, even if Vulcans aren’t affected, you might be. After all, you’re half human.” He expected Spock to take mild affront at that, to point out that the doctor never missed a chance to remind him of that fact; but the Vulcan took no offense.
“That is a fact. But what I’m suggesting is that you filter out the human elements and test the virus on the Vulcan elements in the blood.”
“I don’t get it.” McCoy frowned. “Isn’t the point to find out whether you’re immune, whether you have to take precautions”
“Actually, I am somewhat curious, of course, but that is not the reason for my request.” He paused, and the way that he paused made McCoy brace himself for a surprise. “After piecing together the data recovered from the Tanis computers, I have learned that a Vulcan researcher was the first to die on Tanis as the result of a mysterious illness.”
“A Vulcan researcher” McCoy was aghast. “But Spock, aren’t you fairly certain that they really were working on bioweapons down there?”
Spock nodded.
“Well—excuse me for mentioning it, but don’t Vulcans consider it a tad immoral to create the means by which others kill?”
If Spock felt any discomfort at considering this, he failed to show it. Calmly, he answered, “I do not know. I prefer to think he was somehow uninvolved with what went on.”
“Uninvolved? What was he, a casual observer? If he didn’t tell anyone, then he’s as guilty as the rest.”
Spock folded his arms behind him. “Possibly. Regardless of his degree of involvement. Dr. McCoy, would you be willing to run the tests for me?”
McCoy waved his hand in a whatever-I-don’t-care gesture. “You don’t need me. You could ask the lab to do this.”
“I did. They informed me they’re too busy developing the vaccine.”
“Well, that’s a fact. But there’s a logical gap, here, Mr. Spock. You haven’t finished explaining what the Vulcan researcher has to do with any of this.”
“Oh. I presumed the connection was obvious.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe I’m just stupid and you have to explain it to me,” McCoy retorted, and then felt like biting his tongue off for saying it. Spock gazed calmly at him, and though his expression did not change, there was an unmistakable flicker in the dark eyes.
“I see,” the Vulcan said, and though he did not say, as I had always suspected, McCoy understood it. “Records seemed to indicate the Vulcan’s body is still in stasis on Tanis. He may have died from the same virus that infects Adams, or he may have died from an entirely different microbe.”
The doctor leaned forward suddenly over his desk. "Two viruses? Isn’t one bad enough?”
“Certainly. But if we want to understand what happened on Tanis, the logical thing to do is to recover the Vulcan researcher’s body and ascertain what virus killed him. If the two viruses are related” Spock stopped abruptly, as if unwilling to take the idea any further.
“If they’re related, then what?” McCoy pressed.
“Then we have more reason to believe that Starfleet is involved.”
McCoy started to open his mouth to ask how the hell Spock had come to that conclusion when a sharp beeping came over his intercom. He leaped from his chair, ignoring Spock’s quizzical look.
“Doctor?” the Vulcan asked, but McCoy was already out of his office and passing through the quarantine entrance to Chapel’s isolation unit. The fact that he was still wearing his field unit on his belt saved him several seconds; he switched it on, then entered the proper codes with furious haste. It took him less than fifteen seconds to don an infrared visor and arrive at Chapel’s side.
Chris lay silently in the darkness, as she had for the past eighteen hours. Above her head, the function monitors glowed brightly.
Every one of the indicators had dropped to zero.
"No,” McCoy whispered vehemently, with only himself to hear. It was not happening. Adams was alive Adams was strong enough to kill people. It was not right that the virus could kill someone like Chapel and leave Adams alive. He keyed up more stimulants from the pharmacy, pounding softly on the wall slot until they arrived. He administered the drugs, and when each of them failed, he summoned the life-support complex from the ceiling and lowered it over Chris’ chest.
It worked, sort of. It provoked Chris’ heart into beating again. It filled the lungs with air and emptied them, and removed waste products from her blood.
But it could not produce brain waves for her. And Chris’ brain was dead.
Chapter Nine
ADAMS LEANED AGAINST the wall of the darkened turbolift and felt the strength bleed out of him. He slid, trembling, until he half sat, chest level with his knees. He did not understand this sudden surge of weakness; he had fed off the security guard only a few hours before, and before that, off the border patrol officer. Perhaps he was finally dying.
At the thought, he was filled with terrible fear. He felt as if he were drowning, like a fish out of water, starving for air in the midst of an ocean of oxygen.
The angry buzz of the intercom made him cringe. They had caught him; they would bring him out into the light to die. But no, it was only a recorded message that directed him to start the lift moving again, before the alarm was tripped. Adams grabbed the railing, pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, and started the lift in motion without any clear idea where he should go.
And then an instant of clarity descended on his hunger-fogged brain. “Sickbay,” he told the lift’s computer.
It deposited him on the proper level. The bright lights in the corridor pained him; he drew the hood forward so that it hid his face and followed the markings along the top of the bulkheads to sickbay. To his amazing good luck, he ran into no one along the way, a fortunate thing since they had probably already alerted the crew. He was within sight of the entrance when it opened, and he fell back, flattening himself against a bulkhead.
From where he stood, he saw the back of the captain’s head, and next to him, almost a foot taller, a pale, thin woman. They walked away, their backs to him, and he waited until they had gone.
It occurred to him then, in another rare flash of lucidity, that it made no sense to enter sickbay without a plan. He had a phaser, but it would be better to know where he was going.
Down the corridor he found an empty conference room; he sank into its darkness gratefully, settling in front of the computer terminal. He put his thin arms on it as if embracing an old friend and asked it a question. Many questions. The blood type of Jeffrey Adams. A listing of those with the same blood type and the location of their rooms.
The medical banks complied graciously with his request. Adams watched longingly as the list of names rolled past.
STANGER, JONATHON H.
YODEN, MARKEL
TRAKIS, EVANGELIA
ESSWEIN, ACKER M.
He memorized the first two names and then keyed up a schematic of the entire ship, and then a detailed schematic of sickbay, showing where equipment was stored.
Adams smiled to himself. Enthusiasm shored up his weakness. He had found a place to hide, and with Red’s sensor-neutralizer, they would never find him. Wit
h her subspace transmitter, he would be able to call for help. And soon he would have a place to feed.
He began the more delicate work of overriding the computer security program that protected the locks on the cabin doors. Stanger’s seemed as good a place to start as any.
That afternoon, McCoy sat mourning at his desk. If the night and morning had been a disaster, the afternoon had turned into a living hell.
Nguyen was still in isolation, awaiting test results. But the Andorian’s questions had so irritated McCoy that he had sent her to her quarters. The field suit was enough protection against the virus but not against his fingers around her throat. As soon as he realized what was happening to Chapel, he sent the Andorian away.
He had lost patients before. But when he had lost them, it had been because of life-threatening illness that had advanced too far, and McCoy and the patient had both known it. Or it had been an injury so extensive, so mutilating, that even modern medical techniques could not have restored a life worth living. And again, both McCoy and patient had been prepared for death, had seen it coming.
Chris had simply slipped away. She should not have gone into a coma; and once in the coma, she should not have died. For some inexplicable reason, the virus had acted on her system in an entirely different way than McCoy had observed in Adams. It had shut down Chris’ systems, one by one. And McCoy had no way of stopping it, no way of explaining what was happening.
And since Chris had never wakened, he’d never even had the chance to say good-bye.
Oh, he’d managed to get her lungs breathing again, managed to keep her heart beating but the brain wave stayed flat. In some strange way, he felt that he had been through this before, tried to argue for this before and knew that he was wrong to keep Chris alive. She was gone. And yet, he could not quite bear to let her go.
He left her there on life supports and went into his office, where he did something he had never done before. He drank bourbon while on duty.
The problem was, he couldn’t get drunk enough for it to help. He didn’t want to get too drunk, because of Nguyen. She had recovered beautifully from surgery, but Tjieng had promised to have the lab results any minute now. It wouldn’t look good for him to be passed out at his desk.
After two shots of whiskey, McCoy came to the conclusion that Chris simply couldn’t be dead. He needed her. He had started missing her back when she went into the coma, and already sickbay seemed terribly empty.
The simple fact of the matter was, he loved her. Not romantically, of course; both of them had been hurt too much for that. But he cared about what happened to her. He loved her like family, and God knows, he didn’t have much family to lose. No, Chris simply couldn’t be dead. McCoy decided against taking her off life support. Adams Adams knew what had happened to her. Security was bound to catch him soon, and when they did, he would be able to clear up the mystery.
McCoy heard steps outside his door. Tjieng? Had she come to bring the results in person? He opened a drawer with the thought of hiding the whiskey glass inside. But the steps faded away, and McCoy forgot them. If he could just get his hands on Adams for a few minutes
The intercom buzzed jarringly at him.
He snapped it on. “McCoy here.” Saying just those two words required a supreme effort.
“Tjieng here, Doctor.” He could hear the sympathy in her voice, the unspoken apology for disturbing him, and he thought of the old saw that bad news travels fast. Hesitantly, she asked, “Is it really true about Chris?”
“It’s true.” His voice sounded harsh and bitter to his own ears. “It’s true but she’s still on life support. I keep thinking maybe Adams—maybe there’s something about the disease, about the coma, that we don’t know.”
McCoy sensed implicit disapproval in her silence. Go ahead, he thought savagely. Go ahead and say that I should just let her go.
“It doesn’t seem right somehow.” Tjieng’s voice was sorrowful. “But I have some good news.”
McCoy did not even lift his head.
“Nguyen and Lamia. The two people from Security. Both tested negative.”
“Negative,” McCoy repeated. His mind registered the fact as a good thing, but it did not penetrate the layers of grief.
“You can release them from isolation. From what we gather, the virus is spread through contact, just as you suggested. Exchange of body fluids—blood, saliva—increases the risk of infection. But Nguyen has a strong immune system. She managed to fight off the infection. She’s a real survivor.”
“So it’s not that highly contagious.” McCoy struggled to make the connections. “That’s good. I’ll relay that to Security. McCoy out.” He started to close the channel.
“Doctor, there’s more. We’re distilling a vaccine for use now. I’ll call when it’s available for distribution.”
“Good,” McCoy said. He switched the intercom off before Tjieng could protest and leaned forward in his chair until his forehead rested against the cool, hard surface of the desk.
He ought to go tell Nguyen the good news; after all, she’d seemed so depressed. But he remained where he was, exhausted from grief. He heard someone outside the door again, and argued with himself to get up. Maybe someone was looking for him.
But at the moment he really couldn’t give a damn.
Nguyen lay in the loneliness of the isolation unit and forced herself, once and for all, to stop weeping. The tears had been almost steady since she regained consciousness, and they both surprised and embarrassed her. She had always been an optimist, the type of person who overcame hard luck and never let it get her down, and the overwhelming depression that enveloped her now had so taken her off guard that she was quite unable to deal with it.
After an initial flurry, sickbay had become empty and quiet. McCoy had disappeared after showing her how to signal him, and she’d had a chance to think, to try to understand her reaction.
She had been horribly, terribly frightened, beyond all ability to reason. The fear still oppressed her: it hovered in the background, waiting for another chance to surface.
She’d been ashamed until she realized it wasn’t the fear of Adams, or the dreadful fact of what he had done to her. Not at all.
It was the nearness of death, the realization that her life might be no more than what it had already been. That this was all there would be for her, and there was no more time for anything else.
When she’d first come to, she’d cried, from shock and sheer relief that she’d survived. The relief faded quickly, as soon as she’d realized that Adams had probably infected her. A lingering illness, with no cure, no certain fate in sight. It was not a cheerful prospect, but it brought with it the chance there might be time
Then, this morning, Chapel had died. Nguyen tried to remember when Chapel had gotten sick so that she would know how much time she had left.
Her thoughts strayed again to Rajiv and the others. She wanted to write back, to let him know what had happened to her, to let him know that if she lived, she would do everything in her power to join him. But each time she tried to begin a letter, it came out sounding too melodramatic. (Dear Rajiv, by the time you receive this, I will probably be dead… .) And the glowing screen pained her eyes until she finally leaned back and closed them.
Outside her unit, the door to sickbay swooshed softly. She didn’t open her eyes; whoever it was, she didn’t care. While she knew that someone would be coming soon to tell her the test results, she had already convinced herself they would be positive so that when she was told, the disappointment would be less.
Light footsteps paused for a moment in the outer room, went past the isolation units, back into the storage areas. There was the sound of someone carefully going through equipment. Something surreptitious about the noise made Nguyen open her eyes.
The sound stopped. Whoever it was had apparently found what they were looking for. The footsteps headed back toward Nguyen again.
The man in the cloak paused. In the light, Nguyen coul
d see the cloak’s color for the first time—how opalescent quicksilver shimmered over the deep red velvet. As her mind registered its beauty, her body registered fear.
Her first response was to press the alarm on the side of the bed, but she stopped herself in time. If McCoy came immediately, Adams might kill him outright—or at the very least, the doctor would be exposed to the infection. If only she could press the intercom next to the bed and whisper into it without Adams noticing
But Adams stopped and turned slowly until the front of the hood faced Nguyen’s isolation unit. She froze, motionless except for the insane beating of her heart.
Fingers emerged slowly from under the bell-shaped sleeve, touched the intercom, disappeared again.
A cold-hot thrill passed down her spine. If he came inside, there was nothing she could do now to stop him. He couldn’t know the code, she repeated to herself like a prayer. There’s no way he can know the entry code.…
“Care to join me?” Adams invited, and laughed weakly. He knew she would not summon McCoy. And then, smoothly, he swept out of the room. The door closed behind him.
Nguyen pushed herself up on wobbly arms and hit the intercom. “Dr. McCoy! No, don’t come. Adams was just here”
You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you all here, Lieutenant Ingrit Tomson thought as she stood in the Security briefing room and stared at the eighteen faces—half of them sleepy, half of them not—that comprised the entire Security squadron. Of course she did not say it. Natives of her frozen home world, Valhalla, were supposed to be a cold and suspicious lot, even more humorless (some said) than the Vulcans. Tomson was indeed suspicious by nature—a definite advantage in her profession—and as far as humor was concerned, she kept hers in check. Especially at the moment; no point in causing these people any more cognitive dissonance than was necessary. Those who had been wakened in the middle of their night—Snarl and a handful of others—already looked confused enough. Except for Stanger. He gazed expectantly at Tomson.
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