Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

It wasn’t what he’d wanted. Following the rout at the Medical Academy—disgraced, family ties severed, his career in shambles—he had wanted only retreat, anonymity, to disappear into the proverbial black hole and never emerge. The family had settled a small fortune on him on condition he go away, at least for a while. He wouldn’t need to work at anything. He didn’t like work; it was being pushed into it that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

But the healer’s daughter Boralesh had attached herself to him, and, yes, the child born soon after the wedding was undeniably his—he’d done the tests to prove it, but how was he to have known the custom here?—visiting him with thoughts of retreating further, but where? Aside from the fact that Boralesh’s kin would hunt him down and drag him back, even if he could get his small ship started again, emigration inside the Zone was not the easiest thing for someone with his past, even for a Rigelian.

“Rigel? I have never heard of this place,” Boralesh said, dewy-eyed with innocence (or was it cold-eyed with ulterior motive?), the night they met beneath the stars and she began to lay her snares for him with scents gathered from the levoraflowers. “Where is it?”

“Far away, but not far enough” was all he would tell her. “My family is important there. Too important. I needed to strike out on my own, to prove myself.”

Boralesh knew about family, or thought she did. She had accepted his story at the time, even though a dozen years and three more children later, he had in fact proven himself to be little more than a teller of tall tales and a fair rider of the local sedraz,saddled or bareback, winning prizes that cluttered the sideboard in the best parlor and gave the children something to brag about at school.

Oh, and in recent years there was his “laboratory,” which was the name he had given to the cave in the foothills where she had spied on him and watched his strange rituals. He would go there early in the morning and return after dark, but never say anything about what he did there. Boralesh half-wondered if it was a woman, and not work at all, which drew him away every day. Still, unless it was a woman from the next town distant, Boralesh would have known who she was. The laboratory, or whatever it truly was, maybe only a private cave to retreat to when the children’s voices were too much for him, got him out of her way during the day, and for that reason alone, it was worth it. Even if there was also a woman involved, she told herself, only half-believing it, even as she only half-believed in this place called Rigel.

On the odd chance anyone else from outside ever came to this backward world, Cinchona would count on Boralesh’s skepticism to conceal him. Renagans had heard tales of space travel, but weren’t sure if they believed them. There was no reason to explore, they reasoned. There was food enough for those who obeyed the laws, healers for when they were sick, wise ones to teach them that the stars were the home of the gods and deciders of man’s fate. If the occasional visitor happened along to tell them that beings like themselves also came from some of those stars, he was greeted with knowing smirks and “Oh, tell us another, stranger!”

So this particular stranger, running ahead of his own disgrace, had come to ground here when the power cells on his one-man ship had failed, hidden the ship in the hills, and walked into the nearest village purporting to be a healer from a far province. He had chosen the name Cinchona, and the healers’ guild, after asking a few questions to which he apparently gave satisfactory answers, had welcomed him, particularly since one of their own had a daughter who needed a husband.

For all Boralesh knew, Rigel was a faraway city on her own world, not a distant planet that was part of something called a Federation. Even if she had believed it, it wouldn’t have mattered as much as the fact that she was nearing the age where no man would want her. Cinchona had looked good in her eyes at the time, wherever this “Rigel” might be.

In fact, the Rigel system consisted of several habitable planets, though it was Rigel IV which had two claims to fame. One was the fact that its round-eared inhabitants appeared human, but the configuration of their internal organs, their heart rates, blood types, immunohistochemistry, were similar to those of Vulcans. In fact, only an expert could distinguish a Rigelian’s medscan from Vulcan or Romulan.

The second thing Rigel IV was noted for was the fever.

Rigelian infants were inoculated against it at birth, and in developing the vaccine for this elusive disease the physicians of Rigel V, who had long ago emigrated from Rigel IV for political reasons, had become some of the most renowned in the quadrant. But their former neighbors on Rigel IV were a different matter. Little more than pirates prior to Federation, they were ruled by a consortium of powerful families with a reputation for luring visitors to their world or the resorts on nearby Rigel II, slipping them the live virus, then offering a cure, for a price.

Cinchona knew this very well. His family had made their fortune this way until Federation membership put a stop to it, but by then the family wealth had been diversified into other things. And, yes, his family was wealthy. The “moneyless” economy of the Federation might be the norm everywhere within its borders, but on Rigel IV they still used currency. Succeeding generations of the old pirate families were expected to go legitimate, to send their offspring to the universities on Rigel V and elsewhere and stop dealing in bootleg medicines.

“Set the groundwork for you,” his father had said on the day Cinchona left for medical school. “Did everything I could short of going to class for you. Can’t do that. Too old. They won’t let me. Get out there and achieve something.”

Well, he’d tried, and failed. He was in fact the dullest of his father’s children, and only generous gifts to his teachers had seen him through school. But he was the eldest, and carried the family name, and this brought with it certain obligations, and those certain obligations had pushed him in directions that almost brought his career down around him before it began.

Chapter 11

“A squinty-eyed nonentity named Thamnos,” McCoy announced, presenting the Three Graces, as he’d taken to calling the trio of Uhura, Crusher, and Selar, with the last-known image of their prime suspect, a pink-faced humanoid with a lipless mouth and a permanently furrowed brow that seemed to plead Take me seriously!“First name Crofter, though he never uses it. Thinks just being a Thamnos is glory enough. A mediocre clinician whose prior history includes a series of lackluster assistanceships in one lab or another. I overlooked him as a suspect initially because I was looking for some evil genius. Thamnos may be evil, but he’s no genius.”

“Thamnos?” Selar recognized the name. “Of the Rigelian family?”

“The same,” McCoy said. “They all but run Rigel IV. Some of ’em are clever, but this one’s about as smart as a box of rocks. Rumor has it his father endowed a new lab at the best med school on Rigel V just so they’d pass him through, and he was still in the bottom tenth of his class. Then in the tradition of the old Orion pirate families, Daddy paid for a new library, and suddenly Thamnos the Younger is styling himself a researcher. Published a few not-very-original papers on Rigelian fever, then dropped off the radar some years ago after he tried to publish a paper on Bendii Syndrome using someone else’s data….”

If he listened hard enough, Thamnos could still hear them jeering at him. Anyone who thought medical conferences were genteel gatherings of the thought leaders in research and new techniques, convening to exchange ideas and learn new things, had obviously never been to one. Cutthroats, ready to pounce on every datum and analyze it to the subquark level, then call it into question, they had done everything but throw rotten fruit at him.

He had paid someone to lift the data for his Bendii research from other sources, assuming those sources were sufficiently obscure so that no one would notice. Having slept through his neurology courses and cribbed the exams, he hadn’t understood enough of the material to doctor it sufficiently to avoid charges of plagiarism, and he had been caught.

And fled the conference, the planet, the Federation in disgrace, some highly virulent Rigelian fever cultures in his baggage.

He’d taken the cultures with him from the family’s private stock when he left home almost as an afterthought; he did not at the time even know why. Officially they did not exist, but the old Rigel families still had their secrets. A wild thought occurred to him afterwards that he might have released the R-virus into the air ducts or slipped it into the cocktail-hour punch and taken out every non-Rigelian at the conference. Too bad, really.

Because he was of the First Families of Rigel, he had his own private ship, and no need to go through transporters or sensors or baggage checks. Which, from what he heard from his sources these days (amid the equipment he had scavenged from his ship and installed in his cave laboratory was a surprisingly powerful transmitter, its signals uncrossed by others, since Renagans no more believed in radio than they did in space travel), was no longer the case. The disease he had created (yes, he, the family idiot, had done this!) was changing the rules. Not so much as a microbe could pass the filtration systems now.

Too late!Thamnos/Cinchona thought almost gleefully, his own internal laughter drowning out the voices of his accusers, at least for a little while. The seeds are already in place, the damage already done. Soon you’ll come to me for your answers, and there will be no jeering then!

He had escaped a universe which knew him as a buffoon, some subconscious survival instinct smarter than he was telling him: Take the fever with you!and he did, changing his name, hiding his ship, and blending in on Renaga. Random chance, perhaps, or maybe something more. Because on Renaga, there was hilopon.And that made all the difference.

It was a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that the natives had used as a folk cure for as long as they could remember, reputed to cure everything from cancer to the clap. Boralesh had taught him how to gather it, how to process and store it, how to apply it to open wounds or tincture it for sore eyes or stomach ailments. Skeptical at first, he had marveled at its all but universal applications, and wondered how it worked.

Then, a true Thamnos, born to privilege and the conviction that the needs of the reigning few precluded any consideration of the masses, he wondered how he might exploit it to his benefit. And when, just out of curiosity, he treated some of the R-fever cultures with it and watched them die before his eyes, he thought he had the answer.

He must make certain no one outside of Renaga ever heard of hilopon.If it truly could cure everything it touched, whoever “discovered” it and brought it to the attention of the universe at large had better make sure he owned all the rights to it beforehand. But how to do that on a world where hiloponwas, quite literally, as cheap as dirt? As he tinkered with the substance in his laboratory cave, that one mystery eluded him. And there were other forces at work around him that, short-sighted as he was, eluded his notice as well.

Backward and lacking in resources though it might be, Renaga had its attractions for those whose empire flourished on conquest. Romulan eyes are far-seeing, and while it is assumed that they usually prefer the military solution, sometimes subtler methods are employed. Romulans are long-lived as well, and there are some who will accept as their duty to the Empire the assignment to infiltrate other worlds, go to ground for decades if necessary, and await instructions.

Thamnos was not the only outworlder on Renaga.

“So what makes you think this Thamnos character is behind our neoform?” Crusher asked. “The man you’re describing would hardly have the skills to create something this sophisticated.”

“Probably not on purpose,” McCoy acknowledged. “But if he somehow got his hands on the Romulan Gnawing and grafted it onto certain strains of Rigelian fever…”

“Indeed,” Selar said after a thoughtful silence.

Uhura frowned, scanning her memory for what she knew about Rigelian fever, which wasn’t much. “What’s so special about Rigelian fever?”

“Selar?” McCoy said.

“There are five known strains of Rigelian or R-fever,” Selar explained. “The penultimate strain, R4b, can mutate into two separate strains, R4b1 and R4b2. Of those, R4b2, when acting as a host virus, could potentially cause multiple mutations if grafted onto certain other viruses with similar hydrogen-chain configurations. There have been no known cases of R-fever reported since 2339; therefore, the disease is studied as an artifact in most medical schools, but not in any detail. I should have known better.”

“Don’t worry,” McCoy tweaked her. “We won’t report you to the Vulcan Perfectionists’ Association.”

“With all due respect, Dr. McCoy,” Selar shot right back. “Were there such an entity, it need only be called the Vulcan Association, to avoid redundancy.”

“Okay, people, as you were,” Uhura said. She’d been running a search on Thamnos from the data McCoy provided while they spoke. “Leonard, one question. I’ll grant you a Rigelian might have access to stores of R-fever virus concealed somewhere in their system. The Orion Syndicate still has ties there, even today. But what makes you think Thamnos in particular? Dr. Crusher’s right; he doesn’t seem to have accomplished much in his career.”

“Well, aside from the fact that no one’s seen hide nor hair of him since the Bendii incident, you’ll notice there’s a year missing in the reportings from his private laboratory.”

“And—?”

“What your reports don’t tell you is that the lab, paid for out of Daddy’s pocket, was shut down by the Rigelian government for about a year due to sloppy work habits and—get this—‘questionable practice in the use of strains of R4b2.’ Rumor has it those questionable practices included trying to breed a species of hare that would carry R-fever without succumbing to it. Thamnos’s argument when he was brought up on charges was that he was trying to create a model to be used in testing, but the authorities suspected it was a not-so-clever attempt to infiltrate rival labs with these animals and contaminate their data. He was only let off because the experiment was a total failure. He’d neglected to consider that Rigelian hares can’t be infected with R-fever.”

“And just where did you get that information?” Uhura demanded.

“Not gonna tell you!” McCoy said. “You protect your sources, I protect mine.”

“All the same,” Crusher was still skeptical. “If he’s such a bumbler, how could he possibly—”

“He may be a bumbler, but someone else out there might not be,” Uhura suggested. “Someone from the Romulan side.”

“With access to Gnawing cultures,” Selar suggested. “And enough medical knowledge—”

“Or access to a pool of medical and bio-warfare experts,” Uhura interjected. “Leonard, where are you going?”

“Time to make a few house calls…” He drifted out of range of the holotransceivers and for the moment Uhura let him go.

“I’ll need access to live R-fever,” Crusher said.

“I’m on it,” Uhura said, calling up access codes for Starbase 23, and seeing what ships were in the vicinity that could be diverted to act as couriers.

In the living quarters of the Albatross,the others watched and listened to the medical briefing. Sisko was clearing the dishes away. Tuvok was simultaneously scanning the buzz of communications above Tenjin, monitoring the holo communicator to make certain there was no leakage, and tending to his prize orchid. Zetha slipped away to prep the lab for Selar, one ear on the transmission.

“Speaking of mutations,” Crusher was saying. “The majority of them turned out to be red herrings. They replicated for a while, then died off. Of course, we wasted days isolating and monitoring them, which may have been part of the design. But if we can verify that they were caused by R-fever, we’ll know which ones to pay attention to in the future.”

Just then Selar’s console beeped, indicating that the analysis on the data she’d brought back from Tenjin was complete. She forwarded it to the others. “However, Dr. Crusher, I suggest you add at least one more active culture to your list. This one is a carcinoform.”

Uhura sighed. “In English, please.”

“The pathogen collected on Tenjin is a virus that mutates into a form of cancer,” Selar explained. “It tracks with the Gnawing/R-fever neoform in all other respects. Patients presented to their physicians with cough, shortness of breath, fever, respiratory compromise, unilateral or bilateral infiltrates in the lungs, and symmetrical alveolar spread. Mortality rate was one hundred percent.”

“Sounds like our bug, all right,” Crusher said morosely.

“With one notable differentiation,” Selar said. “Autopsies revealed that every major organ was riddled with cancerous tumors…”

“There goes my appetite!” Sisko said quietly.

“…despite the fact that the disease vector indicated a contagion which was passed from one person to another in close proximity.”

“How many dead?” Uhura asked, ready to add this new death toll to the others.

“Sixty-four,” Selar said.

“A cancer that’s contagious?” Uhura frowned. “How is that possible?”

“Ordinarily, it is not,” Selar explained. “But we are dealing with an artificial neoform which, hypothetically, could be. Both viral infection and cancer are inflammatory processes.”

Before Uhura could ask her usual question, Selar went on.

“Most disease processes, from cancer to the common cold, are the result of normal cells going awry,” she explained. “Either a ‘germ’ such as a cold virus or a cancer-causing agent invades the body from the outside, or healthy cells can mutate for a number of reasons—exposure to radiation, environmental pollutants. The body contains cells known as natural killer cells, which recognize these altered cells as invaders and attempt to destroy them.

“The resulting ‘battle’ is what causes inflammation. The patient exhibits fever, in the case of a virus, or other symptoms with the onset of cancer. If the NK cells win, these symptoms abate and the patient lives. If the mutated cells win, the body succumbs and the patient dies.”

“And you’re telling me this process is the same for cancer as it is for a head cold?” Uhura asked skeptically, making sure she had it right.

“Superficially, yes. Where cancers differentiate is that once they have established themselves in the host, they recruit healthy cells in order to colonize and grow. Tumors, left untreated, will create their own blood vessels and divert the blood supply from healthy tissue. They will then proceed to crowd out and scavenge healthy cells in a lung or liver or pancreas or in blood or bone until the healthy cells cannot function, the organ or system breaks down, and the patient dies.

“It is my hypothesis,” Selar concluded ominously, “that someone, whether by design or accident, has discovered that grafting the Gnawing onto R-fever, possibly with other factors, can sometimes cause the resulting virus, once it is introduced into a host body, to mutate into a form of cancer. The cancer itself is not contagious but, because the virus is, the end result is the same.”

“And it has somehow managed to spread in an enclosed environment like Tenjin,” Uhura said.

“Correct.”

No one said anything for a few minutes. Uhura’s fingers ticked over her console, totting up all the casualties to date.

“We’ve also had a dozen new cases reported on Cestus III,” she reported, “and a possible outbreak on…” Her voice trailed off just in time to hear Crusher ask Selar something about “squeak tests.”

Uhura sighed again. “Squeak tests?”

When Zetha first volunteered to help Selar in the lab, the Vulcan had taught her how to perform viral squeak tests.

“Viruses emit high-frequency sounds,” she had explained, setting up the simple wave transmitter that would do the job. “And each virus has its own distinct sound. A single copy of a stable virus can be detected in a biosample and identified on the basis of its unique sound. Do you understand so far?”

Zetha nodded. Entities so small that they were invisible, existing inside every living thing, some of them powerful enough to kill? Science or sorcery, it was all one to her. If they could kill, why couldn’t they sing as well?

“How does it work?” she asked, indicating the transmitter, insatiably curious, wanting to know everything. Too, pragmatically, the more she learned, the more useful she could be.

Selar, who enjoyed instructing anyone so clearly eager to learn, explained.

“Quartz crystals transmit radio signals. When coated with particles of a virus we wish to identify and exposed to an electrical field, they will vibrate until the virus detaches and shakes free. When it does so, it emits a burst of sound.

“The crystal resonates to the sound and records it as an electrical impulse. Humans cannot hear these sounds, and therefore must rely upon reading the recorded impulse. But most fall within the range of Vulcan hearing, therefore speeding the process.”

“But—” Zetha started to say, then stopped. She was not a Vulcan, but she could hardly say she was a Romulan after a lifetime of being told she was not.

It had occurred to her, once she stopped trembling and settled into the hovercar behind the silent aristocrat whose name she still did not know, that if he had in fact traced her through her codes, he also knew her origins, and which part of her was not Romulan.

It had occurred to Koval as well. In the ensuing months, he would taunt her with it.

“Don’t you want to know your codes? To know who spawned you, what your parents were?”

She did, but she didn’t, not from him. She couldn’t trust him to tell her the truth, and what she wanted above all else was not to be beholden to him.

“No,” she said.

“I don’t believe you,” he had said with his smug little smile. “If you volunteer for a mission, I will tell you. You will know your place before you die.”

She had shrugged. “If I die for the Empire, I’ll be an honorary Romulan after death,” she reminded him, making sure she was beyond arm’s length before she finished her thought. “By then, though, I doubt I’ll care.”

“I am not a Vulcan,” she told Selar, “nor a Romulan. I—”

In answer, Selar placed a sample virus in the detector and activated it. Its almost inaudible hum grew in intensity as the crystals shook faster and faster. There was a single burst of noise—which sounded to Zetha like a tiny, abbreviated shriek—then a winding down to silence as Selar shut down the device and the crystals ceased their vibration.

“Did you hear that?” she asked Zetha.

“Yes.”

“Can you distinguish it from this?” Selar replaced the contaminated crystal, treating the new one with a fresh viral sample and activating the device. This time when the virus shook free, the sound Zetha heard was more like the snap of a twig. She told Selar this.

“The first was the neoform, the second a mutated herpes virus,” Selar explained. Was there a tinge of pride in her voice, pride in Zetha’s accomplishment? “A human would hear nothing but the vibration of the crystal. You hear like a Vulcan. That is sufficient for our purposes.”

Selar had taught her to codify a number of viruses. By now she could identify the Gnawing neoform by its sound, distinct from anything else Selar could test her with. The sense of accomplishment was something new and, as she listened to Selar explaining the process of squeak testing to Uhura, she savored it.

Albatrossslipped into the moil of traffic above Tenjin as the planet’s orbit took it out of Federation space into the Zone. Deftly Sisko adjusted her trajectory until she was running upstream against the flow of Federation-registered vessels moving grudgingly back into their own space, until he had maneuvered her into the queue of nonaligned vessels waiting to cross into the Zone, then slowed the old girl to station keeping. He could feel more than see Tuvok’s quizzical look.

“May I ask—?” Tuvok began.

“There’s a big old Draken multipod astern, coming up to starboard,” Sisko explained. “She’s going to pass within a couple of kilometers of us, and we’re going to let her. When the seventh pod is parallel to us, we’re going to match her course and speed. We’re small enough, if we’re quiet enough, to play shadow until we’re out of range of Tenjin’s sensors.”

“And avoid any potential challenge from Romulan-allied vessels in the sector,” Tuvok surmised. “Very inventive.”

Sisko caught himself shrugging like Zetha. “Just common sense.”

“In summary,” Uhura had said before Sisko shut down the holos to rig for silent running prior to crossing over into the Zone, “we know what this bug looks like—and, apparently, what it sounds like—and we have a fair idea who created it. We still have no idea how it has spread across this much space, and so quickly, even into controlled environments. But we go forward.

“Once we’ve acquired the live R-fever from Starbase 23, Dr. Crusher will compare it with the neoform and possibly tease out the differences. Albatross,you will continue your research from space on the worlds you pass, and on the ground where possible. Set course for Quirinus.”

“Quirinus,” Sisko said, trying the name out on his tongue. His mouth had gone suddenly dry at the thought that they really were inside the Zone now. The danger was almost palpable, like a change in the temperature or the humidity in the creaky old ship, and he found himself sweating. Maybe if he kept talking, he could talk his fears away. “Sounds Romulan.”

“The inhabitants are Romulan in appearance,” Tuvok replied. “However, Quirinus’s location within the Zone precludes it from seeking membership in the Empire without violating treaty. In some respects, its citizens have become more Romulan than Romulans. And there is not inconsiderable resentment toward humans and the Federation.”

“This ought to be fun!” Sisko said wryly.

“It will be challenging,” Tuvok admitted. “Selar and I will have to perfect our Romulan personae well before we arrive.”

Part of that included learning to use an honor blade. Tuvok, adapted by training to any form of weaponry, had mastered the nuances before they left Earth. Selar, whose most powerful weapon had heretofore been a laser scalpel, was less apt. Eager to repay Selar for her trust, Zetha made herself useful.

“It is not a weapon,” she instructed Selar, “but a natural extension of your hand, an extension of your soul. It is given you by your family when you reach adulthood at the age of seven, and you keep it with you from then on. A true Romulan feels naked without it.”

Selar weighed the pretty but deadly-sharp object in her hand and considered this. She seemed to slip into a light trance for a moment, as if calling upon some ancient race memory that might help her become one with something she really would prefer to lock away in a display case and admire for its beauty, not its killing skills.

“I am a healer,” she said at last. “Perhaps understanding too well how much damage even such a small blade can do to internal organs is what restrains me.”

“Then you must free yourself of that knowledge whenever the blade is in your hand,” Tuvok suggested. “Nowhere is it written that you must use the blade, wife, merely that you know how.”

It was the first time he had called her that, and the layers of pretext it suggested—and necessitated—seemed to galvanize her.

“Indeed…husband,” she said carefully, then turned to Zetha. “Show me again.”

And Zetha, who had never owned an honor blade because there was no family to give it to her, nevertheless showed Selar everything she had learned by watching others, true Romulans, challenge each other even in the most refined venues, often over the most trivial things. It was not at all uncommon for two senators to be dining in one of the most opulent restaurants in Ki Baratan and fall to insults over the choice of wine. Lurking in the alleys, she had witnessed the outcome often enough.

“I’ve never seen anyone killed with an honor blade,” she told Selar now, thinking: Not entirely trueeven as she said it. There had been weapons training in the barracks, though the Lord had pointed out that the weapons they were given—which were taken away and locked up again at the end of each training session—were not true honor blades, because ghilikcould never truly be honorable.

She had wondered at the time why at least some of them hadn’t turned on him and filleted him like the dead fish he was. Already some of their number were starting to disappear. Sent on special missions, they were told, but they all knew. Special indeed. So special that no one ever returned. Zetha would count the empty bunks each night and wonder when it would be her turn.

“Interesting,” Selar was saying now, as Zetha hid her thoughts behind tales of old ones, women, adolescents up and down the castes and classes and hierarchies of Romulan society drawing knives in challenge. “How often do they kill each other?”

Zetha shrugged. “Rarely. Mostly it’s bluster. You shout insults, I shout insults back, I pull my knife, you pull yours, we glare at each other, attract everyone’s attention. Sometimes we inflict superficial wounds, so we can show off the scars later.” She searched for a metaphor. “Like two h’vartin an alley. Lots of yowling and claws and fur standing on end, but they rarely actually fight.”

With a skeptical eyebrow, Selar said. “Show me again.”

And she did. Selar was tall and possessed of a long-limbed grace; freed of her philosophical constraints, she learned quickly. In exchange for what might prove a life-saving lesson on Quirinus, she perfected Zetha’s cover identity by lasering off her freckles.