Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

So the Crushers had accepted her, and even the ancient one named McCoy, who otherwise seemed so abrasive, had found a smile for her.

“Zetha, is it?” he’d asked, deigning to appear in full for a change instead of as merely a voice or a floating head. “My, aren’t you a pretty little thing! Or am I allowed to say that? My guess is both our worlds allow an old geezer like me to say pretty much whatever I want. Feel free to tell me to shut up.”

“I would not do that,” she said, repressing the urge to smile for the first time in a long time. Aemetha would have liked this one, she decided.

But this Sisko,Zetha thought, watching him out of the corners of her eyes. What does he want? He is in charge, and it is a given that I will obey his restrictions. Does he think I know how to operate this ship or, more to the point, how to sabotage it? He speaks of food. Perhaps he intends to cook some elaborate meal, and I can praise it and win his trust that way. If he knew what I have had to eat or not eat in order to get to this point…

“Are you hungry?” the Lord had taunted her on the third day of the survival course.

“Are you?” she shot back, for the sheer pleasure of watching his hand half-curl into a fist involuntarily before he became aware of it.

“Tanclus fainted during the forced march today,” he told her instead.

“Did he? Tanclus is twice my size. He needs twice as much food as I do.”

“And you think that makes you stronger?” the Lord sneered.

“If you say so, Lord,” she said, waiting for the blow to fall. For once, it didn’t.

I cannot do the impossible,she thought now, getting up from the seat Sisko had assigned her and heading for Selar’s lab, letting Sisko have the stars to himself. But I will do the best I can.

They were two days into the journey before she understood what the problem was.

Crew quarters on Albatrosswere cramped; the four of them lived, ate, and slept in a single compartment. There were two bunks, one atop the other, built into each side, and a table in the center that did service for meals from the nearby replicator or the minuscule galley adjacent. At other times, it served as map table, writing desk, showcase for the one prized Vulcan orchid Tuvok had brought with him, or anything else any of them might be working on.

It wasn’t the crowding. On cold nights, she and as many as a score of other street brats had bundled together under the piles of clothing in Aemetha’s salon to keep warm. It was because the tidiness and order reminded her of the barracks, and it was because she dreamed.

Chapter 10

The day was overcast and chill; it had been raining. She and Tahir had finished their purloined meal in the alley behind the Orchid and were loitering in the main square near the Senate, watching vids in the window of the Bureau of Announcements, when it happened.

Scroungers’ Second Law: Hide in plain sight. The shadow of the Senate was always replete with scroungers, forgers, black marketeers, operating under the premise that there were more guards per square meter here than anywhere else on Romulus, and where better to conduct one’s illicit business than right beneath their noses because, in their bureaucratic smugness, the powers that were assumed no one would dare?

Thus she and Tahir, having earlier in the day relieved a priggish apothecary of two crates of simple remedies that might keep the foundlings’ winter-long sniffles from becoming something deadlier, were celebrating by filling their own bellies first for once and watching snippets of the narratives that people who had vidscreens could see in the comfort of their homes.

There were two rows of screens, usually reserved for official announcements, but the Praetor was away at his winter palace and there were no official announcements that day. So the two rows of screens warred with each other, one row portraying a space battle, the other a lurid romance replete with betrayals, elopements, suicide pacts, and lamentations by both families at the funerals.

Because there were no announcements, the loudspeakers were turned off, and no sound penetrated the window. Thus she and Tahir watched both vids simultaneously, supplying their own mocking dialogue and holding each other up against paroxysms of laughter when something, and it was not Tahir’s hand working its way, as if accidentally, down from her shoulder, made her entire body tense.

“Something…behind us!” she hissed, jabbing Tahir in the ribs to get his attention. “Go, now!”

Never run when you’ve stolen something. When you’re afraid, act brazen. But when an unmarked black hovercar with sealed windows begins to slow on its way past you, run as if your life depends on it, because it does.

Scroungers knew every escape route in the rabbit warrens of the old city—every alley, cellar, tunnel, catacomb, roof access, secret entrance, and exit. But sometimes the escape routes simply weren’t there.

“The cellar!” Tahir called out behind her, but she slewed around long enough to shout “No!” before zigzagging past it. Part of a network of tunnels through the cellars of boarded-up buildings, she’d heard rumors that it served as a meeting place for a mysterious group whose name meant roughly “unification” and, while she personally thought they were insane, she would not endanger them. Her breath coming shorter, she continued to run.

They should have split up, she thought later, then realized it wouldn’t have mattered. Perhaps Tahir thought he was protecting her by following, ready to throw himself in the hovercar’s path so she could get away. She would never know. They ran until they could run no more, then stopped, exhausted, in an alley where a high crumbling wall separated an ancient burial ground from the featureless rear walls of a row of warehouses.

“A lovers’ tryst,” Tahir said with what little breath he could catch, grabbing her elbow and positioning her with her back against the wall while he stood in front of her, ready perhaps to shield her body with his own if there was to be any shooting. The alley dead-ended a few meters beyond them. They could hear the hovercar’s purr somewhere overhead as it rose above the rooftops, as only official cars were permitted, to scan the alleys, no doubt reading them on infrared. “Only reason we were running was so your lover didn’t spot us. We’re only stealing kisses now.”

Or you’re only using it as an excuse!Zetha thought with what little of her attention wasn’t fixed on the hovercar, begging it: Go on, search elsewhere. It’s not us you want; we’re nothing! There’s nothing here to see!

Tahir raised his right hand, the first two fingers together, and touched them to her lips. The proper way was to touch hand to hand first, but he wanted it to seem to their pursuers that they had been doing this for a while. Zetha touched her fingers to his lips in turn. Ironic, she thought, her mind squirreling, that after months of teasing each other, their first kiss should come on the verge of death! Fingers and lips were numb with terror; only her heart, threatening to pound its way out of her chest, and her eyes seemed to work. The latter were filled with the sight of the lone aristocratic figure flexing fingers gloved in expensive leather, casually making its way toward them.

“You!” the figure called out, just loudly enough. Behind him, on either side of the hovercar’s open hatch, two helmed figures waited with stun batons held across their chests, more deadly weapons no doubt at the ready in those heavy belts.

As if they’d rehearsed it, she and Tahir broke apart, backs to the cemetery wall, guilty lovers caught in the act. The lone figure was not impressed. He focused on Tahir, ignoring Zetha, who wondered how fast she could climb the broken stones of the cemetery wall before the stun batons took her down.

“You do not exist,” the figure informed Tahir, flicking a dismissive finger at him. The voice was almost mechanical, with that inescapably nasal upper-class accent. “Therefore I do not see you. Disappear before I assist you in doing so.”

Needing no further prompting, Tahir allowed Zetha one last horrified glance that said simultaneously I’m sorry/I can’t/I love you!before he bolted in the direction of the ’car; there was nowhere else to go. To the helmed guards he might have been a dung-fly; they ignored him. He literally leapt over the front of the ’car—there was no other way out of the alley—and was gone.

Hyperfocused, Zetha watched, at the same time assessing what was really happening here. The aristocrat was studying her as if she were a butterfly pinned to a dissection table, wings still fluttering. She drew herself up and studied him in return.

Weak-chinned, beady-eyed, the eyes half-hidden under a brow ridge so pronounced there was no telling their color. Whip-thin except for a lazy man’s paunch, studied in his gestures, and, from the cold smile playing at the corners of his downturned mouth, he knew exactly who she was and had been tracking her specifically.

Only one entity tracked the mongrels. Tal Shiar.

“Name,” he barked at her.

“As if you don’t already know,” she snapped back, thinking, Kill me and get it over with, whether it’s for robbing the apothecary or simply for breathing air that might otherwise go to a more deserving true Romulan, but you will not toy with me!

“Name,” he said again.

She sighed, as if it were a great imposition. She was shaking so hard she could barely stand. “Zetha. Nonperson. But you know that.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, aside from the common wisdom that we half-breeds don’t look Romulan enough, you’ve sought me out deliberately.” She jerked her chin toward a small device blinking and chittering on his belt. “You have my codes in that little comm unit you carry around as if it were just a wallet.”

“Do I?” The trace of a smile continued to play at the corners of his mouth.

“Of course,” Zetha said, smirking. “You positively reek of Tal Shiar.” Now that,she thought, was too far,regretting it the instant it was out of her mouth.

The blow came swiftly, a stinging slap across her cheek that knocked her to the ground. She scrambled to her feet without so much as touching her face. Her eyes were dry.

“I reekof Tal Shiar? What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“You mean aside from the ’car and the guards and the marks against the fabric where you’ve removed your rank pips?” Zetha said brazenly.

She was feeling her teeth with her tongue to see if he’d chipped any; he hadn’t. She all but laughed aloud as he touched his collar absently, even though the other half of his brain knew he was wearing civilian clothes, not his uniform, and there were no marks. She was toying with him. The inquisitor was being inquisited. He liked this not at all.

“I’m joking. But your ilk wears his skin like a uniform. It’s the haughtiness. You look down your nose at people, you have that superior tone to your voice. You couldn’t hide that even if you stuttered like a colonial.”

He watched her silently for a protracted moment, his eyes narrowed. “My mentors said the same thing of me,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. “So noted. I will not make that mistake again. You have helped me become a stronger enemy. You should be afraid of me. Why aren’t you?”

Zetha shrugged. “When you’re told every day of your life that you don’t deserve to live, you find there’s very little to fear. If you’d wanted to kill me, you would have by now. Instead, you have some reason to keep me alive.”

“It’s not you I’m interested in,” he said indifferently. “There is an old woman in the N’emoth District. Some call her Godmother. I’m told she shelters the likes of you. Dozens of you. Teaches you to steal, trades in forged documents, illicit substances, even flesh peddling.”

“That’s not true!” Zetha shouted. Too late, she saw the trap. Foiled by a lifetime’s conditioning, she had assumed he wouldn’t be interested in the likes of her, but would use her to go after Aemetha. Now she saw the hidden edge of the sword. Rather, he would use Aemetha to get at her. If she didn’t do what he wished, whatever that might be, Aemetha would disappear. The villa would be razed, the foundlings scattered.

So!Zetha thought, reading it in his too-small eyes. I am more important than I know. But why? If everything I know must be abandoned for a moment’s bad timing, I will know why. Whatever he wants, I must do it. Or at least let him think I will, for Aemetha’s sake.

“My life for hers,” she said, drawing her insubstantial person up to her full insignificant height.

He did laugh then, a small chuckle in the back of his throat.

“You consider that an equal trade? Aemetha is of good family. You are nothing.”

“True.” Zetha shrugged. “But you can’t do math without a zero.”

His eyes narrowed again, this time with appreciation. He crooked a finger at her. “Come with me.”

She followed him to the hovercar. As she stepped between the guards and climbed through the hatch into the comfortable rear seat, she noticed that the windows were blacked out. She thought she knew where he was taking her, but she would never be sure.

Every night, she dreamed it. Dreamed she was back in the barracks with the other ghilik,rows and rows of them, all training for the same purpose—to be the Tal Shiar’s cannon fodder, the ones sent on suicide missions, their lives post-training often measured in days. Infiltrators, agitators, saboteurs, poisoners, assassins. Every day lived was a triumph, but every day lived only brought one closer to the day when one would have to kill, and then most likely be killed.

And every night that she dreamed it there was the risk, for all her training, that she would cry out in her sleep and reveal it.

If she’d cried out on the merchant ship on the way across the Zone, no one paid her any heed. None of them spoke Romulan, and she was bunked in one of the remoter areas of the ship. She had woken with a start as usual in the containment room at SI, no doubt with Tuvok watching through the mirror wall, and again at the Crushers’ residence, and again last night, her first night on Albatross,but no sound had escaped her lips. This second night, the sound of her own voice woke her.

To find Sisko watching her in the dark.

She had the upper bunk on one side, he the lower on the other. He couldn’t see as well in the dark as she could, and didn’t realize she knew he was watching her. Tuvok was taking a turn at the helm; Selar was asleep in the other upper bunk across from her, unperturbed by any exterior noise, her breathing so soft and so regular she might not have been there at all. But Sisko’s deep brown human eyes, all but unblinking, were looking right into Zetha’s.

She stirred to let him know she was awake. We’ll see,she thought, if he will say anything.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Did I wake you?” she answered without answering.

“You must have been having a nightmare,” he said. “You were shouting.”

“What did I say?”

“Just sounds. I couldn’t make it out.”

“It’s gone now,” she lied. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

She rolled over to face the bulkhead, her back to him. Vulnerable, perhaps, but effectively terminating the conversation. She heard him grunt and roll over as well, but not before she realized: It was not Tuvok she needed to be careful of, but Sisko. Perhaps Selar as well—that concentrated Vulcan silence could disguise many things—but definitely Sisko. Winning his trust was now more important than ever.

Tenjin V was a mostly humanoid world whose position unfortunately placed it sometimes in Federation space, sometimes within the Zone. Settled during one of the Federation’s more ambitious expansionist phases by colonists from a nearby system whose sun was failing, it had the advantages of being a fortified outpost on the fringes of the Neutral Zone, a trading hub for several nearby worlds, and was a good source of borite and high-grade gadolinium. However, there were also disadvantages.

“When the maps were drawn at the end of the Romulan War, nobody took the orbital apogee into account,” their contact, one of Uhura’s Listeners, informed them when they met her at the rendezvous point, blending in with the crowd in a bustling public square. “For roughly a third of their year, the Tenji are inside the Zone, and for the first few days their in-system traffic is gridlocked with ships heading in one direction or the other.”

“We did notice considerable local activity on the way in,” Tuvok acknowledged.

“In two days we’ll cross into the Zone and the madness begins,” the Listener went on. The Tenji came in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and there was no way for her guests to know if she was a native or a human whose hair had been replaced with iridescent feathers. “You’ll want to be gone before then.”

“We plan to mingle with the outgoing traffic and slip into the Zone that way,” Sisko said.

The Listener thought this over. “Then we haven’t much time to get you the information you need. As if they didn’t already have reason to be jumpy, this time of year makes the Tenji even jumpier. They don’t like either side and, for obvious reasons, they feel more than a little vulnerable out here. But this is their world, and they make the best of it.”

The “obvious reasons” lay beyond the habitat domes of the planet’s enclosed cities. Tenjin’s axis was pointed toward its sun, leaving it a sharply divided world of barren lunar landscape, of pocked and pitted waterless wasteland, one hemisphere constantly fried by a merciless sun, the other facing the frozen void of open space. The Tenji lived entirely in enclosed habitats.

“Like so many huge glass paperweights,” Sisko had remarked as the Albatrossjuddered into her assigned berth in synchronous orbit above the night side.

“Indeed,” Tuvok had concurred.

Inside the habitats, night and day were internally regulated to keep the inhabitants from going mad with constant exposure to either light or dark. Outside the safety of the habitats, there was atmosphere to breathe but, depending on which side of the planet one lived on, the temperature was a constant of either desert heat or arctic cold, and dust storms or storms of needle-sharp ice crystals often obscured the stars. If they were ever attacked and their habitat domes damaged, the Tenji would not survive for long.

Still, within the tenuous safety of their domes, they had developed a rich and varied culture based primarily on trade. As one of the last free ports on the Federation side of the Zone, Tenjin flourished. Over a dozen species speaking as many languages strolled past the landing party amid a maze of kiosks and shops and restaurants exuding enticing sights, sounds, and smells; displaying clothing in more colors than the eye could see and the flashing lights of the latest personal technology; offering samples of everything from Risan massage to domjotgames to freshly made chorizo.The Tenji themselves strutted and preened like so many peacocks.

“Market day in New Orleans meets Tokyo’s Ginza,” Sisko said, inhaling deeply. His educated sense of smell told him that someone somewhere in this place was preparing an eggplant ratatouille, and he intended to find out who and where. “Ever been to New Orleans, Tuvok?”

“I cannot say that I have,” Tuvok replied. He and Selar were enacting their Vulcan personae on Tenjin. As they moved with the crowds, Selar was surreptitiously scanning each passing shopper with a medscanner equipped with an added long-range filter to record every cough or sneeze occurring within this particular dome. Tuvok would as unobtrusively collect atmosphere samples, dust samples, even samples of the soil in the potted plants displayed everywhere, whereas Zetha—

“How do they live?” she blurted out, and Sisko realized she must be practically dizzy with sudden sensory overload. “Where does all this food come from?”

“My sister’s eldest,” Selar told the slightly startled Listener, absolutely deadpan, slipping the still-scanning medscanner into a pocket. “It is her first offworld journey.”

“And so naturally she is curious about everything,” the Listener said, playing along. “There is a narrow greenbelt along the north-to-south border where sun meets void,” she explained, as if Zetha were in fact simply an inquisitive young Vulcan. “The inhabitants long ago decided to reserve those areas for agriculture rather than living space, and to live instead inside these domes. Even so, most of their food needs to be imported from offworld.”

“Thank you,” Zetha said, lowering her eyes much as Sisko had seen Tuvok and Selar do. It was a good performance.

“Your sister’s eldest?” Sisko challenged Selar as the Listener left them and went off to arrange passage on one of the interdome tubes.

Selar quirked an eyebrow at him. “My sister has three offspring, therefore logically one must be the eldest.”

“But you said Zetha was—”

“I did not. I said ‘my sister’s eldest.’ I did not say ‘She is my sister’s eldest.’ That the Listener chose to interpret my statement—”

“I see,” Sisko said, shaking his head in amazement. “So that’s how it’s done!”

McCoy looked up from the screen and rubbed his bleary eyes, which by now were more red than blue. It was nearly dawn. Behind him the computer voice droned on, tirelessly reciting the data on telomerases he had sent it in search of while he scanned every paper on cytokine engineering in the UFP medical database. He’d thought multitasking would speed the process, but the computer’s voice was getting to him.

“Shut the hell up, will you?” he growled. “I’m trying to concentrate here!” The computer, not hearing the proper command, droned on. “Goddamn literal-minded machine. Computer, mute!”

He cursed himself for being old and absent-minded. Forty, fifty, a hundred years ago he’d been up on all the journal entries and known who was working on what, and the rumor mill would have told him who among that elite group of scientists whose talents lay with gene splicing might have gone bad. Now he had to go through reams of data comparing the ever-mutating viruses not only with each other, but with similar archived bugs, looking for a common denominator. While he searched, people were dying. He could hear the agonal final beating of their hearts, hear their labored breathing ratcheting down like so many broken clocks.

“What’s the rush?” he chided himself. “It’s not up to you to find a cure, just the perpetrator. You keep charging ahead, you might miss something important. Slow down!”

In the private lake at the back of his property, he could almost hear the trout taunting him, leaping and splashing with complete impunity, knowing he was too busy to get at them now.

“Motivation…” he muttered. “What’s his motivation? Why would someone create a killer like this? Is he psychotic? Trying to control the galaxy? Distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the natives so he can claim their land for his own? Or is it revenge? On whom, for what? Figure out his game, and you’ll find him…”

When at last he found what he was looking for, the realization almost knocked him out of his chair.

“Why, you smarmy sonofabitch!” he muttered triumphantly, seeing the similarity between one of the mutations Crusher had isolated and an illustration from a paper presented at the Federation Medical Academy over a dozen years before. “I’ve got you now! I told them there’d be a signature!”

He pushed a button on the arm of his chair and it floated gently off the floor and hovered on a cushion of air. The chair had been a gift from Spock some years ago after McCoy had reached 125, an acknowledgment that the doctor’s human legs were not as strong as they once were. McCoy zoomed across the room to the comm unit and, not bothering to check what time it was in San Francisco, opened a frequency.

“Nyota, Beverly?” he shouted, his voice shaking with excitement. “Come on, ladies, get on the horn. I’ve got him! I know who created this goddamn bug. I’ve found the signature. Where’s Selar?”

“Nothing like what you’re describing,” Dr. Sekaran told Selar when the Listener had left them alone in the heart of the medical dome on Tenjin V. “The only unusual event we’ve had in the past year or more was a cluster of cases of a bizarre carcinoform that occurred simultaneously in several of the domes, then disappeared just as quickly.”

Sekaran was in essence the senior physician for all of Tenjin. His headquarters, at the heart of a dome in the central government complex, was as busy in its own way as the myriad mercantile domes it serviced. Here Sekaran and his multiplumaged staff monitored the health of every citizen on the planet, though visiting tourists, he admitted, were more difficult to track.

Selar studied the readouts scrolling down the clearsteel walls of the medical complex, her practiced eyes searching for something commensurate with the specimens she and Crusher had thus far identified.

“Probably not at all what you’re looking for, but you did say you wanted everything,” Sekaran went on. “It popped up unexpectedly two seasons ago—anything transmissible is unexpected here, because the atmosphere is filtered more carefully than even on a starship. We simply can’t let something contagious get loose inside even one of the domes, because they’re all interconnected by the travel tubes. As a result, we’ve become so accustomed to the filtration systems that we’ve been spoiled. Even a common cold could kill some of us.”

“Understood,” Selar said, studying the specific dataset Sekaran indicated. “You did say the entity was a carcinoform?”

“It was quite bizarre,” he said. “People turned up at clinics complaining of chills and fever but, on examination, were found to have a rapidly forming cancer that started in the lungs and metastasized to the rest of the major organs. Tests showed no evidence of unusual bacteria or viral infection. Yet people in close proximity—family, coworkers—would ‘catch’ this from each other as if it were a flu bug.”

“When you say rapidly forming…” Selar began.

“Days. Often in less than forty hours of onset of symptoms. I’ve never seen anything move so fast in my entire career. Germs are supposed to do that, but not cancers. And cancers are not supposed to be contagious.”

If Selar was shaken by this information, she gave no sign. “I believe, Dr. Sekaran, we can abandon our parameters of what is ‘supposed’ to happen where this entity is concerned.”

“So you think it’s related to the bug you’re trying to track?”

“Possibly. I will need access to this data in order to run more tests.”

“If your medscanner can interface with our system, you’ll have it,” Sekaran said.

Back on the ship, it was clear from the aromas that Sisko had found his eggplant. Albatross’s galley was barely big enough for him to turn around in, but, having gathered all the ingredients he needed on Tenjin, he was making magic there.

“Step right up, ladies and gentleman,” he announced, spooning something savory and steaming over plates of fluffy white rice. “No replicated rations tonight. This evening’s main entree is freshly prepared, completely vegetarian, and guaranteed to please the most demanding palate.”

“What is it?” Selar asked, inhaling appreciatively before taking her plate to a nearby console where she could work on Sekaran’s data while she ate.

“Eggplant ratatouille ,”Sisko explained, watching for the nods of approval as each one tasted his masterpiece. “Baby eggplant sauteed in virgin olive oil with finely chopped Vidalia onions and fresh garlic, then blended with carrots, plum tomatoes, three kinds of bell peppers, a few new potatoes, some zucchini, cilantro, cayenne, and, well, a few secret ingredients of my own, and simmered to perfection.”

“Excellent,” Selar remarked.

“Indeed,” Tuvok concurred. “All of this from ingredients gathered on Tenjin?”

“Not counting my own secret spice blends,” Sisko grinned. “I have my own herb garden on Okinawa.And I never go anywhere without some. I sure hope I haven’t violated the Prime Directive by comparing recipes with the Tenji,” he added with a wink, “although the restaurant did call itself the Interplanetary Café, and I could swear the sous-chef with the blue feathers had a distinctly Cajun accent…”

He stopped himself and blinked at Zetha, who had finished her portion in the time he’d been talking. “Did you even taste what you just ate?”

“It’s good,” Zetha said as if stating the obvious, wiping her plate inelegantly with her fingers to get the last of the tomato sauce. “Is there more?”

“Don’t know where she puts it!” Sisko marveled, doling out a second helping and watching her attack that with equal gusto. “If you’re going to eat with your fingers planetside, no one will ever mistake you for a Vulcan.”

“I’ll remember that,” Zetha said with her mouth full. “But where I come from, when there’s food, you eat it.”

Sisko still wasn’t sure he believed she had simply been plucked off the streets of the Romulan capital and sent to them on a mission of mercy. He intended to have a little chat with Tuvok on that very subject when Zetha was out of earshot. Assuming Zetha was ever out of earshot; she seemed to be everywhere on the small ship except where he’d denied her access, mostly following Selar around like a puppy, setting up petri dishes, sterilizing instruments, tidying the lab. For now—

“Where did you—?” he began, but just then Uhura’s voice interrupted him.

“Dr. McCoy’s identified our mad scientist,” she said, shimmering into being, flanked by Crusher and McCoy. “It may not help us much, but it’s a start.”

It had begun by accident, like the discovery of penicillin. Every schoolchild knows how Sir Alexander Fleming, in a bout of bachelor carelessness, went on holiday and left an uncovered dish of deadly staph bacteria lying about, only to find blue mold, no doubt migrated from someone’s unfinished lunch left equally carelessly in a wastebin, claiming its turf here and there on the surface of the dish and driving the bacteria back wherever it touched. But where Fleming’s random chance led to a cure that had saved millions, the man the Renagans knew as Cinchona had stumbled upon the power to kill as many and more.