by David Smith
Her last choice was the one that caused her most concern. She hoped to get some help from a trained pathologist, but with Commander Mengele busy ‘interrogating’ her other self, Lieutenant Chen would be on duty as the ships medical officer. There was no other official pathology expert available.
She’d asked Susan to check the ships roster to see if anyone else had any experience of pathology, and had been briefly delighted when Susan announced that there was a professional pathologist’s assistant aboard Tiger.
Her delight had turned to horror when she was told that the pathologist’s assistant in question was Crewman Jonah James.
Few people in the enlightened twenty-third century were superstitious, but even those who vociferously denied the existence of ‘bad luck’ avoided Jonah James like the plague. Even a person as intelligent and logical as Lieutenant-Commander Aisling O’Mara, who would tell anyone there’s no such thing as a jinx, would still do anything she could to stay out of Jonah James’ way.
Jonah was possibly the nicest person aboard USS Tiger. He was friendly, and funny and nothing was too much trouble for him. But he worked on his own every night, banished to the dog-watches in the Communications Office for his own (and everyone else’s) safety.
When he was twelve years old, he’d been involved in a tragic roller-coaster accident. A bizarre series of happenings had resulted in the death of all but one of twenty-four passengers on the last ride of the day of the tallest ‘coaster on Mars. Both of Jonah’s parents had died in the wreckage along with twenty-one other passengers, but Jonah had walked away from the carnage without so much as a scratch.
Shortly after that, his school had burnt down and Jonah’s best friend miraculously escaped the fire, only to be tragically run-down by a speeding fire-engine. The whole town sympathised with poor Jonah, but things just got worse and worse.
More bizarre events and accidents followed, such as the time Jonah’s pet dog was struck by lightning. Jonah had been walking his pet spaniel, Lucky, in the worst electrical storm anyone in town could ever remember when the poor dog was instantly barbecued. Jonah himself was apparently saved from electrocution by the dog’s leather collar his own sturdy wellington boots.
People began to take notice of this bad luck and shook their heads sadly at the unfairness of it all, but self-preservation finally took hold a few years later. Jonah was on a school camping trip that was decimated by a bear attack, a bite from a viper, an incident with a rabid squirrel, and the decapitation of the teacher leading the trip by a great white shark that had bizarrely found its way from the ocean to a small fresh-water lake in the Appalachian Mountains.
Jonah was just eighteen when he was run out of town.
Bad luck dogged him wherever he went and he eventually wound up working in the morgue of a large hospital as the pathologist’s assistant.
Jonah reasoned that if bad-luck was stalking him, at least his companions in the morgue wouldn’t suffer unduly. Even that had gone disastrously wrong when an incident with a Bunsen burner and an unfortunate release of methane gas from a bloated corpse had led to an explosion and fire that gutted the hospital.
Jonah had again walked away without so much as a singed eyebrow, but he’d been sacked the next day. Eventually he drifted into Starfleet, the only place willing to over-look his horrific litany of misfortunes. The Fleet accepted him, but his individual Commanding Officers were rarely so forgiving and after a record amount of postings over a five year period, he’d washed up on USS Tiger, as far from the civilized galaxy as anyone could get.
Perhaps because Lady Luck and USS Tiger were not acquainted, Jonah’s misfortunes had been less severe since his arrival a few years back, and he happily whiled away the wee small hours in the solitude of the Comms Office. Even so, the tag of being ‘Jonah by name, Jonah by nature’ had stuck, and few people ever volunteered to work with him (more than once).
The significant exception to this was a member of O’Mara’s own staff. Crewman Sarah ‘Numbers’ Cumbers was the ship’s most gifted mathematician, but had her own issues. A child prodigy, Sarah had gone to Yale University at age eleven, completed her Bachelor’s Degree by thirteen and her Doctorate by sixteen. She’d studied pure mathematics and specialized in statistics, while learning nothing at all about people.
Her inability to relate to people had made her a difficult co-worker, but in most cases she never even got that far. At every job interview she’d proudly describe her Doctoral thesis, which was a brilliant statistical proof that within any major company, an individual’s salary and their contribution towards corporate productivity were inversely proportional. So limited was Sarah’s social ability that she couldn’t understand why she was so rarely successful.
She’d drifted between what few jobs she’d won before finding a berth aboard USS Tiger. As soon as she’d been introduced to the enigma that was Jonah James, he’d become an obsession.
Sarah could deduce probabilities for almost anything, but simply could not fathom why things invariably went badly for Jonah and those around him. He was the only thing in her universe that didn’t fit, and she spent every spare minute she had trying to make sense of him.
She studied his history, followed his movements and actions and trawled through the minutiae of his life, looking for patterns and connections.
All of this left poor Jonah distinctly uncomfortable. He’d spent most of his adult life being avoided, and yet here he was under the microscope. It certainly didn’t help that while he was amiable and charming, Sarah was awkward and socially inept. Her unusual up-bringing had left her with none of the social skills most people took for granted.
They were the oddest non-couple on a ship crewed almost exclusively by ‘odd-one-out’s.
O’Mara thought long and very hard about risking James on the away team. Every time she reminded herself that there really isn’t any such thing as bad-luck, she’d recall another bizarre coincidence or accident. Statistically, Jonah was a high risk option.
She eventually conceded due to her lack of other options: after trawling through the records of the entire crew looking for useful knowledge and experience she’d been left with a choice of James, Crewman Liz Garvey, (an ex-veterinarian) or Crewman Arness (who’d worked as a butcher).
Almost inevitably, O’Mara was contacted by Crewman Cumbers, who suggested that she should carry out a statistical analysis of the plague related deaths against other reasons for mortality amongst the Sha T’Al.
O’Mara did her own maths and deduced that the chances of herself having a bizarre accident were about one in nine, but would improve to one in ten if Cumbers joined the team.
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They set up camp in an abandoned hospital near the outskirts of the city. PO Park had already had some experience of un-locking Sha T’al encryption algorithms, and found that perhaps logically, the system used here was identical to the one they’d unlocked in their own universe some months ago.
The Hospital’s computer system was completely encrypted, but the most recent records were the ones that they found to be least secure. The Sha T’Al obviously had greater things to worry about than data security by that time.
O’Mara, Van der Vaart, Torres and Cumbers pored over a mountain of data that the Sha T’Al had collected in the last six months and found nothing that seemed to make sense.
The Sha T’Al records showed that they’d eliminated toxins as the cause of the illness, and they’d also virtually discounted biological agents as the disease didn’t follow any accepted form of transmission pattern.
The afflicted victims had nothing in common that they could identify, and there weren’t even any solar radiation bursts that were apparent.
Despite that, every victim seemed to have similar symptoms: multiple organ failure, resulting in a slow and lingering death.
The last investigations by the Sha T’Al were incomplete. As the disease had taken hold, afflicting more and more people, the number of medics and scien
tists available to fight the contamination had crashed, and about a month previously, the investigation had died along with the last member of the team undertaking it.
The Sha T’Al had lost the fight. The few lingering bodies all seemed to be infected to a greater or lesser degree and the Terran aid workers could do nothing more than ease their suffering.
Late in the evening, O’Mara sat back and rubbed her tired eyes. She’d spent forty-eight hours straight trying everything she could think of to find some pattern to the infection.
That was only the first hurdle in trying to cure the problem, and yet they were no closer to this than when they’d arrived.
There was no rhyme or reason anywhere, the only thing all of the Sha T’Al had in common was being on this planet.
That was when the light-bulb moment occurred.
The planet. It wasn’t just the Sha T’Al, there was something wrong with the whole planet.
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On the Bridge of the Tana battleship, Dave had got lucky. The ship was so identical to the vessel they’d encountered at Joran Dal, that he had to assume it was this universes’ equivalent of that vessel. He asked PO Park to send over the same programme they’d used to break the encryption lock on the main data-banks of that vessel and found that the programme worked perfectly in this universe too.
Once past the basic security he could access the ship’s logs and data recordings. It was a sorry tale.
The ship had set out months ago from Tana space with a view to surveying Cho-dal-far, which at that time had just been ceded to the Tana Empire by the Sha T’Al as a check on Terran expansion in the area.
They’d arrived and begun survey works to support the colonisation of the planet. There was a report of a Terran Empire ship raiding the planet, but the ship had left after a single orbit, being chased off by the battleship still orbiting the planet and they’d thought nothing more of it.
A few weeks later, there had been a few cases of illness, which the Tana had assumed was a problem adapting to the unfamiliar environment of the new planet. They’d begun analyzing the cases, in slow time at first, but with increasing urgency as it became apparent that there was no obvious cause.
The first fatalities occurred just a few weeks later, and panic had ensued. More and more of the crew were coming down with symptoms, but the Tana medics had no idea what was actually wrong with them and didn’t have the necessary medical skills to find a cure. It all sounded horribly familiar.
The Tana had tried to contact their Command, but had been ordered to remain in Sha T’Al space until they’d identified the nature of the illness. Shortly after that, their leader had died, and the remaining Tana had been unable to find a solution.
Many of them had carried on with their survey tasks as that was the last order they’d received from their Captain, but before long most were too ill to work.
Dave had observed a Tana crew first hand after defeating a version of this battleship at Joran Dal. They were almost comical in their timidity, but there was nothing funny about the way they seemed to drift towards certain death here.
Without their Captain to make decisions and drive them on, they’d effectively lost the will to live, and Dave could find nothing to suggest they’d even diverted more resources to trying to find a cure for the disease.
He pored over what data they’d gathered, and called Commander Mengele on Tiger. ‘Commander, I don’t mean to pry, but I need to know if you’ve made any progress with your opposite number.’
She paused and took a breath before replying and Dave had a distinct impression that she sounded like she’d been doing something quite strenuous. ‘I have . . . interviewed her . . . at length, and I believe I have extracted what she knows about the Empire’s chemical and biological weapons. After her involvement in developing the bio-genetic weapon that devastated the Sha T’Al, she was asked to work on similar weapons for use against the Tana.’
‘Aware of the consequences of her work for the Sha T’Al, she claims to have deliberately forestalled further development by faking evidence to show that there was no Tana gene-complex secure enough to produce a weapon that definitely couldn’t mutate into something harmful to humans. Instead she produced non-lethal biological weapons such as an airborne strain of Arcturian Syphilis that would render a population incapable of resistance without causing deaths or significant injuries.’
‘She had begun manufacturing the bacterial agent in large quantities, but this was not acceptable to Admiral O’Connor and he drafted in Crewman Michael Alvari and Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara to begin seeking alternatives. My counterpart did not have full access to their research, but knows Michael Alvari was working with a variety of Dengue and Ebola type viruses.’
She paused. ‘Perhaps more worryingly, O’Mara boasted of having a team working on developing the smallest possible sub-elementary particle war-head, which she expected would win the war for the Empire in a matter of days.’
There was doubt in her voice as she continued. ‘My counterpart says she tried to temper the weapon concepts and became involved deliberately for that reason, but her questionable loyalty to the Empire meant she was viewed as a security risk.’
‘Great work, Commander, I hope you haven’t over-exerted yourself. I’m sending you the medical records from the Tana battleship. It looks like the Tana weren’t equipped to deal with the infection that killed them. They’d done a basic investigation, but don’t seem to have had a clear idea of what they were dealing with. I need you to review the records, cross-refer that with what you’ve learned from your counterpart, see if you can isolate the pathogen that caused the disease and then find out if there’s any way to counteract it.’
Dave hesitated before adding ‘You realize of course that your opposite number may well know the answers to those questions?’
He heard her pause before replying ‘Yes, First Officer, I understand my duty. If it’s at all possible I will extract what information she knows.’
Dave breathed a sigh of relief ‘Thank you Commander, I know I can rely on you. Hollins out.’
Dave sat in the silence of the empty Bridge. Things were going from bad to worse. Not only were they definitely dealing with biological warfare, it was a distinct possibility that the Empire had developed sub-elementary particle weapons too.
Such weapons had long been postulated, but there was no consensus as to how such a weapon could be built or packaged or deployed. Any research likely to advance that field was strictly prohibited as current knowledge suggested such weapons could not be scaled down to be ‘tactically viable’.
The only thing that all physicists agreed on was that any such weapon would yield levels of energy unseen since the big-bang that created the universe.
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The next few days passed slowly as Dave waited patiently for the away team working on the surface to gather data in an effort to find out what was killing the Sha T’Al.
He’d also allocated a team to the survey the Tana battleship, as whatever had killed the Tana was definitely gone. To be on the safe side, he’d had every air-lock on the ship opened and evacuated the atmosphere completely. He’d also gathered what corpses were still on board the battleship and had them transported to a burial site on the surface where the Sisters of the Order of Latter Day Saints had already interred their colleagues that had died down on the planet.
It was during one such trip that ASBeau solved the mystery of what had infected the Tana. He was searching one of their ground facilities to see if there were any more bodies to be disposed of when he spotted a familiar shape nestling in a recess in a corridor.
He immediately withdrew, but the security team returned and carefully extracted a spider-mine that had already discharged its load.
Careful examination in Tiger’s lab quickly identified a mutant strain of the human Ebola virus, clearly altered to attack the Tana physiology. With great relief, the bio-chem team reported that even if it hadn
’t already died off the strain could not possibly affect humans.
The Tana had walked straight into a trap, setting off dozens of such mines that discharged viral material into the air around them. It appeared they hadn’t even noticed, certainly not until it was too late.
Shortly after that, Chief Deng reported back from the Tana battleship. All of the structure and systems of the Tana ship were completely intact, and bore no sign of damage or even much wear and tear.
‘Thanks, Chief. Is there anything worth salvaging?’
‘The whole ship sir. It might be worth while taking the ship as a prize and keeping her as a back-up. I think Tiger might be able to use a bit of help’ replied the little engineer.
Dave thought about this for a second before making a decision ‘Thanks for the idea Chief, but we’re short-handed as it is. We don’t have enough bodies to man her. I don’t think we could even spare the bodies for a minimal salvage crew.’
‘True, sir. I hadn’t thought of it that way’ replied the little engineer ruefully.
‘It’s an interesting thought, though. Maybe we should see if we can find some way to hide her away, keep her as an ace up our sleeve?’ mused Dave. ‘I’ll give it some consideration. Thanks Chief.’
Dave had only just terminated the connection when he got a call from Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara, still down on the surface. ‘Good day, Lieutenant-Commander, how can I help you?’
‘Ah, well, it’s like this you see . . . I think we’ve found the problem.’
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Ten minutes later Dave was on the surface, back in the Hospital where O’Mara’s team had set-up their base.
O’Mara looked deadly tired, and even by her usual unruly standards her hair was a mess. ‘I had an idea of what the problem might be and spoke to Commander Mengele about it. She . . . interrogated . . . her other self and confirmed we might be on to something as it dove-tailed with the research she’d been asked to do. We altered our methodology and everything just fell into place.’
