SIX

Stardate 8992.8 (Late 2289)

U.S.S. Excelsior

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, Commander,” said Dr. Klass, gazing at Sulu from across the top of one of her biobed monitors. “But you look like hell.”

“No offense taken, Doc,” Sulu said through a thin smile. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I suppose it shows more than I realized.”

Standing beside her primary workspace in the sickbay’s main science lab, Klass watched him with that same sincere I’m-listening-very-closely expression that Sulu had seen crease the faces of many of Starfleet’s best physicians over the past quarter century.

After appraising him in silence for several moments, she said, “Maybe watching that woman die right in front of you yesterday affected you a bit more than you know.”

He sighed, wishing, just this once, that she wasn’t so damned perceptive. But he also couldn’t deny that her gift of perspicacity was the main reason that Excelsior’s chief medical officer had become such a close friend and confidante during his first few difficult weeks serving as Captain Styles’s executive officer and second-in-command.

But despite his feelings of friendship for the doctor, he decided not to mention last night’s return of his intermittently recurring dreams—at least not before he’d spent a little more time pondering the question of why a pale-visaged ghost he’d seen only once more than four decades ago had chosen last night to pay him one of its rare visits.

“It isn’t every day you see someone die the way that poor woman did,” he said at length, recalling the horror of watching a living being suddenly collapse into a few handfuls of vaguely crystalline residue. “Have you identified whatever it was that killed her?”

Klass released a frustrated sigh and shook her head. “I’m still running analytical comparisons, using all the data I scanned during my sleepless night from the tissue samples you beamed up. All I can say so far is that your initial impression may be on the right track: I can’t rule out this thing being a strain of the Omega IV pathogen.”

Moving with a supple grace that belied her apparent age, the gray-haired doctor approached the computer terminal that sat atop her desk and tapped its slender keypad. An image of a greenish, globular-shaped microorganism, magnified many thousands of times, appeared on the screen.

“The virus you found on Galdonterre still hasn’t given up all its secrets,” Klass continued. “But at least I finally managed to persuade the captain that it isn’t casually communicable.”

“Speaking on behalf of myself and everyone who was with me on Galdonterre,” Sulu said, chuckling although the night he’d spent in quarantine had passed very slowly indeed, “you have our undying gratitude for that.”

Klass cast a grin in Sulu’s direction before turning back toward the screen. “I’m sure I could spend the rest of my life studying this virus before I get all the way to the bottom of it. But there are a few things I’ve been able to determine right off the bat.”

Sensing that Klass was quickly shifting into lecture mode, Sulu folded his arms before himself and leaned against one of the examination tables. “Such as?”

“First, it’s obvious to me that this is a deliberately tailored pathogen. And a computerized cross-comparison to known ‘wild’ strains with similar molecular markers revealed that the original biochemical substrate the genetic designer used is an extremely rare and potent retroviral form of the Levodian flu. Fortunately, it isn’t an airborne strain like the original Levodian flu virus, or the Omega IV pathogen. So at least the captain won’t have to try to enforce a general quarantine around Galdonterre.”

“That’s something to be thankful for,” Sulu said, relieved at the news. “But are you sure about the Levodian flu connection? I had a bad bout of it as a child, but it didn’t turn me into pile of rock salt.”

“Of course not. Levodian flu is generally harmless to most humanoid species, especially once the fever, chills, and sniffles run their course.” Klass tapped a control on the terminal’s keypad, and the magnified image gave way to a schematic diagram of a familiar yet alien double-helix DNA spiral. “Needless to say, there’s a lot more folded into this bug’s genome than the baseline Levodian flu virus that might have kept you out of school for a day or two. My cross-checks with some generous and discreet friends at Starfleet Medical and Starfleet Intelligence have confirmed the presence of Klingon DNA—along with some extremely peculiar human gene sequences as well.”

Sulu’s eyebrows rose involuntarily. “Klingon—and human? Someone mixed those genes together deliberately?”

“That’s a hard question to answer,” Klass said with a small shrug. “After all, there are plenty of microorganisms capable of acquiring genes from one another through direct cytoplasmic transfer. That phenomenon alone might account for portions of the virus’s genome.”

“But not all of it.”

Klass nodded. “Right. The odds against this organism arising naturally are astronomical. It has far too many points of similarity to the pathogen that devastated the planet Qu’Vat in the twenty-second century to be unrelated.”

“Qu’Vat,” Sulu said. “That’s a Klingon colony, isn’t it?”

Klass nodded again. “Just two light-years from the border of Federation space. A Denobulan physician named Phlox wrote several papers detailing the plague that broke out there one hundred and thirty-five years ago, and its aftereffects. He drew heavily on the work of a Klingon geneticist named Antaak, who used tailored retroviruses to treat the plague.”

“Did these papers explain how both human and Klingon genes might have gotten grafted onto our virus?” Sulu asked.

“Phlox wrote extensively about Antaak’s recombinant DNA techniques,” Klass said, pinching the bridge of her nose as she considered the possibilities. “Of course, the genes could have jumped from one viral strain to another without any advanced lab work, especially in the original ‘wild’ airborne version of the pathogen. The virus we’re dealing with here could have picked up DNA sequences from members of one species before being transmitted to members of another species and picking up theirs, whether or not the original virus itself had been tinkered with in other respects.”

Because of his knowledge of the genetics of exotic plant life—he’d been an amateur exobotanist longer than he’d served in Starfleet, thanks in no small part to his mother’s work as an agronomist—Sulu was willing to believe that random mutations and gene transfers might explain the lethality of this new virus. But the horrible death of the woman in the bar—not to mention decades of suspicions about the motives of the Klingons—wouldn’t allow him to invoke pure coincidence just yet.

“Is it possible,” he said, “that the Klingons intended this virus to be a weapon?”

She spread her hands. “I can’t say for sure one way or the other. It’s tough to imagine anybody perverting bioscience in such a way as to deliberately create a bioweapon that kills the way this thing can. But I suppose we can’t put that past them, especially given what happened on Qu’Vat.”

Sulu felt a surge of embarrassment that he wasn’t better versed in the past couple of centuries of Klingon frontier history. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the Klingon scientist I mentioned—Antaak—worked on variants of his initial therapeutic Levodian flu retrovirus for years after the plague. It was as though he wasn’t satisfied with the cure, despite the millions of lives he was credited with saving. So he continued his recombinant DNA research. And either because of or in spite of this work—nobody really seems to know which—several million Klingons living on Qu’Vat died from another similar plague outbreak sometime in the early 2170s. Antaak himself was one of the casualties.”

Sulu winced. Despite his ambivalence toward the Klingon Empire and its aggressive, expansionist ways, he’d had personal dealings with a Klingon officer or two during his time in Starfleet. He had even worked alongside one on an important clandestine mission. He had found these men, warriors all, to be honorable; their culture seemed to demand it. Such people deserved better than to die from the ravages of some microorganism.

“It sounds almost as though everyone was wiped out,” Sulu said. “Were there any survivors?”

“Of course,” Klass said, though a haunted look crossed her lined face. “There always are. Several million of them, in fact. But these people suffered permanent retroviral alterations to their DNA. These changes rendered most of them sterile. There was widespread albinism, anemia, as well as just about any other chronic ailment you can imagine.”

Sulu’s throat suddenly went dry. He knew enough about Klingon mores to guess what must have happened next. “The Klingons must have quarantined the planet afterward. And then mass-euthanized all the sick people the virus hadn’t managed to kill.”

Klass nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “With typical Klingon ruthlessness, no doubt, since they’ve never made it a secret that they consider only the ‘strong’ to be worthy of survival. For all we know, the virus I’ve got under the microscope right now could have been part of a secret Klingon bioweapons program that the Empire decided to test on its own ‘undesirables’ on Qu’Vat.”

Undesirables, Sulu thought with an inward shudder. Lepers. Outcasts.

And outcasts frequently became outlaws.

Sulu considered the nameless Klingon albino who had so terrified the woman in the spaceport bar—and who had apparently engineered her death with a highly specific biological weapon. Then he recalled the chalk-skinned terror of his childhood, the phantasm that had afflicted his dreams yet again last night.

Despite the renowned Klingon tradition of weeding out “weaklings”—a phenomenon that could only make albinism an all but nonexistent rarity in the Klingon Empire—Sulu realized that the odds were decidedly against the dead woman’s albino being the same man he had witnessed raiding his mother’s lab on Ganjitsu more than four decades ago.

But last night’s dreams still argued persuasively that his subconscious believed otherwise.