3

“So let me get this straight,” Turner said, “A new virus that’s completely lethal breaks out just as we arrive with a cure for the virus you have? That doesn’t seem like too much of a coincidence?”

Dorna, the female Gouran at the craft’s controls sighed. “The government hasn’t been forthcoming with any information. And yeah, it seems extremely coincidental… almost planned.”

“Who would try to kill an entire world’s population?” Turner mused.

“I’m pretty sure we didn’t do this to ourselves,” Dorna replied. “Even if the goal was to set up Starfleet to get the rest of the population interested in secession, the casualties would be too high to make it worthwhile.”

“The Breen?” Cunha asked.

“I wouldn’t put that past them,” Turner said, “But if they’ve been courting Gour II as allies, why would they try and kill them?”

“That doesn’t make sense to me either,” Dorna said.

“All right… What do we know about The Oppressors?” Turner asked. “Is it possible they came back to get revenge?”

“We don’t know anything about them,” Dorna replied. “It’s been a hundred years since they were driven out, and even when they were here, they didn’t allow us to know anything about them.”

“So no idea where they were from, where they went? Do you even know what they looked like?” Turner asked.

“They were very careful not to reveal themselves to us. When we rose up, they vaporized their dead rather than allow them to fall into our hands. Anyway, that was a hundred years ago,” Dorna said.

“A hundred years is the blink of an eye on the galactic scale,” Turner said. She sighed. This line of questioning didn’t seem like it was going to be fruitful. “So what’s our next play?”

“They city’s on lockdown,” Dorna replied. “But people are allowed to go from the places they work to their homes. I’ve been steering clear of the commerce and industrial areas and sticking to the residential areas. That way if we happen to see a patrol, they should assume we’re just headed home. I know a few routes out of the city where they probably won’t notice us.”

“Do you think they really destroyed the ship?” Cunha asked.

Turner saw a wave of sorrow and panic creep over the young woman’s features as she asked, and even Turner had to admit that she’d felt sick in the pit of her stomach ever since Tarim had broke the news to them. But he wanted them demoralized and broken. It was her job to keep Cunha optimistic. “No, I don’t think so.”

“But Tarim said…”

“I know what he said,” Turner interrupted. “What we need to remember is that it takes a lot to take down a Starfleet vessel. I’d wager that at worst, the Horizon simply had to leave orbit. But we should try and contact them.”

“We don’t have our communicators,” Cunha reminded her.

“Does this thing have a transmitter strong enough to contact the ship?” Turner asked.

“There’s one back here,” said one of the Gourans in Breen armor.

“You don’t mind if I use it to try and raise the ship, do you?” Turner asked.

“No, go ahead,” Dorna replied.

Turner moved into the rear seats and situated herself near the communications console. “Do you have the Special Operations comm frequency for the Horizon?” Turner asked Cunha.

“Three-fifty-seven point eight,” Cunha replied.

Turner entered the frequency in and the recorded her message. “This is the away team to the Horizon. Speak up if you can hear me.” She hit a button to put the message on loop. It would only alert them if there was a reply.

“So tell me about this resistance of yours,” Turner said.

One of the men seated next to the radio responded. “We’ve been organizing for a couple years. The government has gotten more and more oppressive, and when they started talking about breaking off relations with the Federation, a lot of us decided it would be better to fight than accept the path they’re leading us down.”

“Are you actually fighting them, or just organizing?”

“We’ve been focusing on recruitment and keeping the whole thing secret. We’ve struck against the government a few times, but never openly.”

Turner nodded. “So busting us out of that prison was just because we’re Starfleet?”

The other man nodded. “We feel that you’re too important to leave at the mercy of the government.”

“That makes sense. Does your group have a leader?”

The first male she’d been talking to looked to the other who shook his head. “We do have a leader. We can tell you she’s a senator, but we don’t want to reveal any more about her at this time.”

Turner nodded. Precautions made sense if they didn’t want their patron in government to be caught. She decided to change the subject. “Lieutenant Cunha, that piece of Breen equipment, do you think you can hack into it?”

Cunha frowned and gave Turner a wry smile. “I won’t know until I start trying. I need to interface with it somehow, figure out how its machine language and logic work. If I can get that far then I’ll probably have multiple layers of security software and encryption to get through.”

“So you’ll have it by tomorrow?” Turner asked.

“Sure, if you can freeze me in time for a month or two. You know, we don’t even know what the Breen written language looks like…”

Turner put her palm to her forehead and felt where the implant met her skull. There had been no response from the Horizon, she wasn’t sure how useful these Resistance fighters were going to end up being, and the one thing Cunha might have that would point them in a decent direction would probably prove to be an empty pursuit. Still, it beat sitting in a cell.

* * *

Bashir tried not to think of the toll he was witnessing before him. Bodies were piled up like cordwood, uncounted, and would soon be moved to a mass grave where they would be disposed of. Small flying insects were already swarming the mass of fresh biomass.

He was not taking any chances. He wore a full self-sealing biosuit that consisted of a single-piece polymer jumpsuit with a clear face-shield. It also contained its own supply of air, which he felt was safer than a filtration mask. Like the original virus, it didn’t appear that this one could affect humans, though he wasn’t certain yet whether or not they could become carriers, and the last thing he wanted to do was spread this around to other Gourans. There was also the remote possibility that it could mutate to infect humans, at which point there would be no telling what the lethality of it would be.

He was doing his best to not personalize the loss of life he was witnessing here. He had become a doctor to help people, and to try and prevent situations like the one he was witnessing here, but there was nothing he could do to help the dead. Concentrating on making sure that this didn’t spread to the living was the only worthwhile use of his time. That didn’t change the fact that there was a bleakness he felt in his soul right now that wasn’t passing, regardless of what he told himself about how he should feel.

Bashir withdrew a hypo-extractor and placed it to the artery in one victim’s leg and hit the button to extract a sample of blood. He watched the container fill with the brownish fluid and moved on to another one. With an abundance of victims already slain by this new virus, it did not take him long to collect the ten samples he wanted. He placed them in his medical bag and tapped the combadge under his biosuit. “This is Bashir. I have what I need. Please beam me back to the laboratory.”

“Yes, sir,” a male voice responded. As he felt his body dematerialize, he mused that he didn’t even know who was assigned to handle him from the Gouran government. If not for the fact that they needed him alive, he wasn’t convinced that they wouldn’t simply spread his molecules into space around the planet. A moment later he felt himself rematerialize, which once again proved his fears unfounded.

He was alone in the lab they had provided him. This was the most advanced lab on the planet, yet most of the medical equipment dated back a hundred years. It reminded him of the equipment he had encountered when he, Sisko, O’brien, Worf, and Jadzia Dax had gone back in time and boarded Kirk’s Enterprise, which just happened to be when that ship had been in the midst of its infamous tribble infestation. It occurred to him that perhaps their complaints with the Federation weren’t completely unfounded. They were a remote world that provided them with labor and political power, but what they received in return fell short of the promise the Federation had made to them. He could see it for himself, and he was sure that if the Horizon was still out there, captain Sheppard would see it as well and do something about it. What was the point of commissioning a crew to troubleshoot the cracks in the Federation following a war if they didn’t have the political authority to actually fix anything?

Bashir sighed and placed the vials of blood into the blood analyzer. He looked into the eyepiece at the cells, then turned a knob that would zoom in to view any viruses within. More modern medical equipment would put a three-dimensional rendering of the virus up on a screen, or even create a holographic display. The virus was long, and wormlike, with tiny spine-like protrusions on it. It was similar in appearance to the one they had come here to cure. So why have the retrovirals unleashed this? he asked himself.

He pulled up a record of the original virus on another display. They looked almost identical. “Computer, give me a readout of the genetic code of both samples.”

“Working,” said a monotone female voice. A moment later piece of paper emerged from a machine with two sets of genetic codes. The first one was substantially longer than the second one. Both were too long to compare side-by side though. Bashir frowned. Was it possible that the complete genetic code from the new virus was contained within the old one?

“Computer, analyze the genetic code of the new virus and tell me if it exists within the old one.”

“Affirmative,” the computer said.

“So the original virus acted like a package and a delivery system for the new one…” he said to himself. “Killing the original virus in the host’s system unleashes the new one, and the new one just happens to be completely contagious and completely lethal…” An idea that he wasn’t comfortable with began to occur to him. “Computer, compare the RNA in this second virus to any other plague or virus that the Federation has ever encountered. Are there any similarities?”

“There is an eight-eight percent match with the plague on the Teplan homeworld,” the computer replied.

“The Teplan plague?” Bashir asked incredulously. That had been a Dominion-created weaponized virus that they had used in the Gamma Quadrant. It had been incurable, it had wiped out the entire sentient population there, and he had visited that decimated planet himself. With the Dominion War over, he quickly dismissed the idea that they had planted this here themselves, and there was no way the virus would have found its way here naturally. That only left a few possibilities. “This was bio-engineered specifically for the Gouran population… Someone is actively trying to murder an entire world.”

* * *

Tavika sat silently across her cell from Ipesh Nod, looking out into the vacant open area between cells. They hadn’t said a word to each other for hours, ever since their incarceration began. She didn’t want for them to speak to one another either. Her Romulan ancestry would continue being a problem for him, and she was unwilling to allow him to belittle her for something she had no control over. The fact is that numerous people in Starfleet had been underestimating her throughout her entire career, and at first she had dealt with it by working harder and over-compensating until she won their grudging respect. And now, decades into her career, she was no longer willing to cater to other people’s xenophobia.

Nod sighed loudly, which was a clear indication to her that there was something he wanted to say. She continued looking out of the cell and not at him. She was beginning to wonder if the assignment aboard the Horizon was going to work out. She knew Sheppard was solidly on her side, but she was also expected to work alongside Nod, whose attitudes she found contemptible.

“I’m sorry they stuck us together,” Nod said suddenly.

This is new, Tavika decided. Ignoring him had been based on the fact that he’d been ignoring her. She wasn’t willing to be the one to strike up a conversation. Nevertheless, she didn’t feel that her response should be overly friendly just because he’d opened up his mouth. “Indeed,” she said.

“Well, shouldn’t we be working together to try and find a way out of this cell?” Nod asked.

“I’m comfortable enough here,” Tavika replied.

“Lieutenant, I understand that we got off on the wrong foot. I…”

“No,” snapped Tavika. “We didn’t get off on the wrong foot. You revealed yourself to me as a xenophobe, and that isn’t something I need to put up with. To make things worse for you, you’ve never come to me with an apology, nor have we had a single conversation where my heritage didn’t enter into the conversation in some way.”

Nod’s eyes widened. Tavika smiled wryly. Apparently he wasn’t accustomed to being held accountable for his actions. One thing she did inherit from her Romulan parents was a fiery temper.

“Before the Dominion War, I’d never seen a Romulan unless we were staring at each other across the Neutral Zone about ready to blow each other out of the sky,” Nod said. “During the war, they came in as allies, but not until after they’d played both sides while trying to take advantage of the situation.”

“And as we’ve discussed before, none of this has anything to do with me,” Tavika responded.

Nod shook his head and exhaled loudly. “Lieutenant Commander, I’m not trying to make excuses for my behavior, but I want you to understand that the first time I looked at you I didn’t see a fellow officer, I saw a potential threat. I saw the face of the enemy.”

“Individuals aren’t enemies of the Federation. Governments are,” Tavika said coolly. She could appreciate the fact that Nod was making an attempt at amicability, but she wasn’t required to give him immediate credit and allow him to excuse his own behavior. In fact, she had to admit that she was enjoying this exchange.

“Look, I’m not trying to excuse my behavior,” Nod said. “I had an issue, I reacted badly.”

Tavika smirked. “You reacted badly, and yet there’s one simple thing you should have said by now that remains unsaid.”

Nod looked at her blankly. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“An apology, Ipesh Nod,” she said, keeping her voice an exaggerated whisper. “When you’re a rude asshole to someone for no good reason, you’re supposed to tell them you’re sorry. And then it’s their choice whether or not to accept it. You still haven’t said you’re sorry to me.”

Nod lifted his chin and stared at her, but said nothing.

“Impossible to say the words?” Tavika asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No, it’s not that,” Nod said.

“Then what is it?” Tavika pressed.

“I just… that’s not me. That’s not how I like to do things.”

“You mean you think you’re infallible and can’t admit it when you’re wrong…”

Nod started to say something then stopped. “You’re right. I’m sorry for the way I treated you.”

Tavika’s smirk deepened. “And now I get to decide whether or not to accept it.”

“Well, what’s your decision?”

“I’m not sure,” Tavika said. She knew she was being blatantly obnoxious at this point.

“You’re tooling with me,” Nod said.

“I might be,” Tavika agreed, and she finally allowed a smile to creep onto her face. “Look, we’re Starfleet. We’re more evolved than the pointless bitterness and hatred, and we have to work together.”

“That’s if the ship isn’t destroyed,” Nod said.

“I don’t believe the ship has been destroyed,” Tavika said. “They’ll say anything to keep us demoralized while this is going on.”

“They said they’re going to kill us,” Nod pointed out. “We need a plan to get out of here so we can survive this.”

“Well, we can beat the first person to lower the force field and then make a break for it,” Tavika said.

“Low odds of survival,” Nod said. “That’s assuming they ever lower the force field at all. So far the only ones to do that were the Breen, or whoever they were.”

“I have an idea that could be fun, and even up the odds a bit,” Tavika said. “They’re already on high alert because of the virus plaguing this planet. I fake an illness and you call the guards. They’ll want me quarantined immediately. When they open up the cell and start checking us out, we give them the sense that we’re not going to resist, then I grab one of their weapons while you attack the other one.”

Nod cocked his head slightly. “That might at least give us a fighting chance of escape,” he agreed.

“Timing will be crucial,” Tavika said. “I suggest we wait for things to calm down a bit first.”

“This evening, right before they change the guards. They’ll be more tired then.”

Tavika grinned. “I look forward to our first coordinated effort.”