I might look like I’m living on stringy, wilted green things, but I’ve programmed the computer to include animal proteins in my replicated nutrition shakes. Just two days ago, Stok asked for a taste of my personal favorite—Rigellian Fungus w/brown algae—and I was happy to oblige. I took great pleasure in watching her suck down half a wreet cat liver. At least I was deceiving someone, even if it was as elementary as handing too-trusting Stok, the Vulcan vegetarian, a whipped liver shake masquerading as tree fungus. I need to keep my skills sharp somehow. Not like my work gives me many opportunities to be duplicitous. How does running a computer analysis of Bolian waste products make me a better intelligence operative? Fudging those test results would be the perfect way to undercut our enemy. Hah! I graduated top in my class! I should be a model of stealth and subtlety! Instead, I’m reduced to hiding in the dark and eating raw meat with my bare hands to assure that my blood chemistry stays stable.

  So, I don’t think I’ll be killing Quark today, though here I am still writing in this journal.

  A thought occurs: Maybe the Tal Shiar already knows about my writings. Maybe they tell us not to do this, but know all the time that we will anyway. Maybe they even manipulate our minds to make sure we will start a journal.

  Maybe nothing I do is my own idea.

  Last night, in bed, after I had cleaned up the bloodstains on the counter from the raw steak and Stok was asleep in her room, I laid there in my own, tiny, narrow bed, flat on my back, arms at my sides, eyes squeezed shut, and tried to say my name out loud. Not “Seret,” but my name, my real name.

  I couldn’t say it.

  They warned us, back in the school. They told us not to try, and back then I thought, “Why would I want to? I’m not her anymore. Now I’m Seret. That’s who I am.”

  Except I know I’m not. Maybe my implanted identity is faulty because I still want to hear someone say my name.

  I might be able to write it down, but I’m not going to try. If I try and I can’t, it would be more than I can take. Perhaps I should increase my drug dosage. If I escape the station, would I still be Seret? Or would the person that I was, I mean—the person that I am—come back eventually? They never answered the question in training. I imagine it’s because we wouldn’t like the answers.

  Entry #1040

  I have been a fool. The Tal Shiar might know what they’re doing after all. I am too exhausted to say more. Have another shift. Must be on my way…

  Entry #1041

  Where to begin to sort out the events of the last two days? Should I begin with how I was awakened in the middle of the night, or dwell on the hours I kept watch beside biobeds, or should I attempt to tally up how many thousands of tissue samples I ran through the computer for analysis? My skin is pulled tight over my skull, tender to the touch like one massive bruise. Each muscle aches with a low, dull throb, screaming out for rest, but deep inside me I can feel my heart thrumming with anticipatory dread, knowing that at any minute I’ll be back on duty. All the humans milling around the replicators waiting for their turn to order raktajino or coffee have puddles of droopy blue-gray skin around their eyes. I’m used to seeing them look shiny and healthy. Even during the worst hours of the war to date, none of them has looked this bad. A colleague from the visiting ship, Enterprise, Ensign Mayer, lost a boot in his rush to help a coding patient; he didn’t notice until he stubbed (and broke) his stocking foot when he walked into a console. Nurse D’Rosta knocked over an instrument tray when she fell asleep—standing up.

  I should be composing and encoding my official report instead of rambling on to my journal, but I’m afraid I might miss critical details if I wrote the report now, details that might lead to the kind of assignment discharge that even I want to avoid. My superiors would surreptitiously snatch me from my DS9 quarters for debriefing. They’d say, “How could you forget such a thing? You weakling! You would be more useful planted in a pot and fertilized!” (An old lover used to say, “Do what you’re told or you’re Vulcan food.” I never understood that saying until today when, try as I might, I can’t seem to remember how to undress, let alone recount the mind-numbing details of five consecutive shifts.)

  This image lingers in my imagination: Very slowly and theatrically, a neuro-analyst would reveal a mind-probe needle, hoping my horror might dislodge any lingering reticence I might have. They would then proceed to root through my mind to take by force each particulate my report should have had in the first place. By pouring it out here, I’m hoping to make sense of what I’ve seen and experienced for myself, and then I can consider them in a more clinical light.

  Too many details, too many images, too many sensations to process systematically. I close my eyes and see flashes of light and color, I hear beeping consoles and the shouts of the infirmary staff. I hear the squeaking gurney wheels as the corpses are wheeled out of the way into ancillary hallways until the time comes that the insanity subsides and the dead can be tended to.

  Stop. Too much. Discipline, idiot. Here is what happened.

  Dr. Bashir woke Stok and me mid sleep-cycle and instructed us to join him in the infirmary as soon as possible. We were instructed to take a less traveled route to avoid being seen and to offer no explanations to any crewmates or civilians we might encounter. Of course we made haste, finding upon approach to the infirmary that a quarantine zone had been established. Within, chaos reigned. Impromptu patient stations had sprung up in every available square meter, creating a maze to navigate. I scanned the crowd, looking for someone to report to. Gloved and suited-up doctors and medical technicians, most of whom I didn’t know, scurried about; I lost count after twenty, each of them seemingly attempting three tasks simultaneously.

  Stok and I made our way to the center of the chaos, where I found Bashir and a tall redheaded woman directing traffic and having a nearly indecipherable conversation that seemed comprised of two-thirds diagnostic terms and one-quarter drug names, interspersed with the occasional verb. Patients in antiseptic sleeves, life support leads dangling around the edges of the plastic covers like polymer vines, were being wheeled into the isolation ward, and though I could not make out individual faces, it quickly became obvious that every man and woman being pushed by me was a Vulcan.

  “Seret,” Bashir called out, interrupting his colleague. “Excellent. Suit up.” Pointing at the airtight suits isolation ward nurses are required to wear, he continued, “I need you in there now. You too, Stok. Full tissue panel, fluids, radiation scans. ADBs and composites. Everything. Bring me the results when you have them.”

  My medical training took hold. “What are we looking for?”

  The red-haired doctor—there was no question in my mind that she was a doctor—replied, “We don’t know. Initial readings indicate a neurotoxin, but that’s only conjecture. We’re probably dealing with symptoms right now. Determining the actual causative factor behind those symptoms will happen when we have more data.”

  “Delivery method?”

  “Unknown.” Thus, the isolation sleeves.

  “Where did they come from?” I asked, reaching for the garment, the monofilament crinkling unpleasantly in my fingers.

  “You don’t need to know—” Bashir began.

  “Julian,” the other said in modulated tones. “I grant that this has been need-to-know up till now, but keeping information classified at this point might slow down our diagnostic process. Trust has to start somewhere. And they’re her people, after all.”

  Bashir paused for a long moment.

  “I’ll answer to Captain Picard and Colonel Kira on this,” she said, reassuring him.

  “You’re right, Beverly. Of course. I’m simply trying to figure out what information is most useful to them.” Turning to me, Bashir said, “Our patients were rescued from a survey ship, Damask Plain. The Enterprise senior staff has just begun to review the logs, but we believe the crew might have recently landed on a planet that had been held by the Dominion. The doctor, Virek—did you know her? no?—left behind chart notes hypothesizing that the Dominion may have engineered a biological or chemical agent, something particularly lethal to Vulcans, that the crew was exposed to during their expedition.”

  “A specious conclusion in light of the available data,” I observed. “What factors lead her to consider such a—?”

  “She wasn’t able to say,” the one called Beverly—Crusher, I now know, the chief medical officer of the Enterprise and former head of Starfleet Medical—said. In lowered tones, she added, “And we’re not going to have an opportunity to ask her now.”

  “I see.” Stepping into the suit and touching the seal tab, I said, “We will obtain the profiles you have requested.” I glanced at Stok, who was also suited up. “How many?” I asked, deliberately oblique.

  “How many what?” Bashir asked.

  “Have died?”

  “Five so far.”

  “And how many are infected?”

  “Twenty-three,” Crusher said. “All of them. The entire crew.”

  I followed another trolley into iso, Stok at my heels. “We will be back in forty minutes.”

  And we came back in forty minutes only to receive another list of tasks to accomplish. We quickly discovered that as quickly as we completed one round of diagnostics, the results became obsolete requiring yet another round. Patient status fluctuated wildly from moment to moment. Eventually, Bashir and Crusher assigned pairs of us to sets of patients and it became our job to address all the monitoring, testing, and treatment for our patients. Tissue analysis, enzyme recalibration, and neuro-pattern stabilization were only the commonly performed tasks. One of my patients developed a web-like purple rash on his extremities. Another’s optical nerve hemorrhaged, requiring Dr. Crusher to step in to perform surgery. It was not her first procedure nor was it her last. All the doctors moved from biobed to biobed until they were reduced to stumbling over their own feet. Until last night—or was it the day before, I can’t honestly say I recall—I’ve never seen Dr. Bashir appear tired. The man is indefatigable. Without proper knowledge, one would suspect cybernetic implants, not mere genetic enhancements.

  What we’re facing I can’t yet say. Maybe that’s part of my reluctance to file my report. I have my own guesses. Being a trained medical practitioner and an intelligence officer, I know the tactical value of using microorganisms to accomplish insidious, deadly chores. Like the deep-cover spy, a nearly invisible biological assassin can live, unsuspectingly, in the company of its victims, waiting for the precise moment when the target is most vulnerable…

  Because answers haven’t been forthcoming—and because of the highly sensitive nature of the Damask Plain’s mission—Crusher and Bashir have relocated the isolation ward to a more secure, contained sector of the station. I overheard Crusher commenting on Captain Picard’s concern that the infirmary is too easily accessible to the station public, making their work there subject to questions—or visible to enemy informants who might be on the prowl for intelligence.

  Like me! I thought as I eavesdropped on Crusher, allowing myself a tiny hint of a smile. Vulcans don’t smile, so I know I must be cautious when indulging myself in such a fashion.

  They’ve also transferred the Enterprise’s EMH into this makeshift ward to provide round-the-clock attention to the ailing Vulcans. Why Starfleet gave their medical hologram such a persnickety, irksome personality escapes me. Many of the Starfleet medical officers I’ve dealt with have much less grating personalities—like Dr. Bashir for instance. The EMH has few, if any, of the physical traits that humans tend to deem attractive. His eyes—what is the word Lieutenant Newar used?—are “beady” and he suffers from advanced alopecia. Perhaps that is the point: If the EMH were desirable to look upon, the medical staff would be distracted from their duties. That reasoning, however, doesn’t explain his irritating bedside manner. Patients are not soothed by his presence.

  I did observe Stok composing a communiqué intended for headquarters—she used the highest-level encryption algorithms to send it so it will take me some time to decipher it once I find it in the logs. Apparently there is an admiral there—a famous and well-known doctor—who has expertise in treating Vulcans. When I learn the identity of this specialist, I will include it in my report.

  And I find, without trying, yet another reason why I should wait to send information to my superiors. They would undoubtedly want to know who this mysterious specialist is.

  So what do I know? Over the course of my shifts, I learned that the Enterprise towed in the Damask Plain after finding her adrift in interstellar space near the Trivas system. In retrospect, I recall having seen this ship’s name on more than one occasion in docking logs. Though, now that I know something more about its mission, I realize in retrospect that I have never treated any of its crew nor have I encountered them in any of the station’s public areas. Damask Plain was not Starfleet or Bajoran registered, but DS9 was unofficially listed as its homeport, a fact I found buried deep in a security database. (All those months weeding through programming modules finally prove useful!) Putting these facts together with snippets overheard in the infirmary, it becomes clear to me that the Damask Plain is a covert intelligence-gathering vessel. The Dominion has their Vorta. The Federation has their Vulcans.

  Ironic, that I have been tasked with an assignment to save the lives of my fellow spies, the very individuals who, under other circumstances, I would be interrogating and casting aside after they’d outlived their usefulness.

  I am certain I am forgetting much, but my prolonged hours in the infirmary threaten my clarity and I’m bound to err due to fatigue-induced dullness. Another steak might rectify my depleted endurance, but I fear I lack the sense to adequately cover my clandestine dietary behaviors. Stok would not understand and she would ask questions. Undesirable questions.

  Though it’s conceivable that she might, upon seeing me hunched over the table masticating the bloody flesh, walk right on past without noticing, the desensitizing events of the last four of five shifts rendering her as numb as I am.

  Entry #1042

  “You have not been well.”

  These words, which I heard when I awoke, explained why every joint in my body felt thick with gritty sand paste—why I felt like I’d been swimming in the tissue-searing radiation of an anti-matter containment tank. Later, when I had time to reflect, I realized I had been hearing for quite a long time before I became completely aware, but sounds, images, sensations, all were swirled together in my memory to form a discordant mélange.

  I opened my eyes. Familiar sounds and smells settled into my senses and I realized I was lying on a biobed in the infirmary. I probed for my last memory, unable to recall how and when I’d arrived here. Stok and I had come off our shifts. I was sure of it. I tried to speak, but my dry tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. An orderly slid a straw between my lips and I sucked on it automatically, inhaled a sweet, thick medicinal-smelling liquid. Despite the unpleasant texture, my body craved fluids and I drank greedily.

  “That’s enough for now,” Bashir said. “Can you sit up?”

  I knew from long experience that the question was not meant to elicit information, but was a suggestion. With help, I pushed myself up into a lounging position and looked around. Yes—as I suspected—the infirmary. The quarantine section set aside for the Vulcans, except most of the beds around me were empty. A few orderlies milled about; those that moved went slowly, without urgency.

  I wet my lips and croaked, “How long?”

  “Less than two days,” Bashir said. He consulted the chrono on his padd. “Forty-two hours, to be precise. When you and Stok didn’t report for your shifts, we sent an orderly to your quarters and found you both unconscious.”

  I tried to focus on the faces of the one or two Vulcans in the beds nearby. Bashir anticipated my question. “Stok is in stasis. The disease moved quickly in her, faster even than the others. We might be able to help her if we can figure out how to control this organism, but I’m really not sure…” He passed a hand over his eyes and I saw the light of reason briefly flicker. Bashir had passed the borders of exhaustion and was deep into that other country beyond.

  I found myself saying, “I am a Vulcan, Doctor. You do not have to—” what was the expression? I looked at the cup with the straw in his hand and thought longingly of the sweet syrup it had held “—sugarcoat the truth.”

  “Our Vulcan patients are hovering at critical or on the cusp of death,” Dr. Crusher said. “And we’ve exhausted every path of inquiry we can think of. We only have a rudimentary idea of what we’re dealing with.” She had been standing behind Bashir, a padd in either hand, carefully scanning two charts. “But that might change with you, Seret: you’re the only Vulcan patient who has come anything close to recovering.”

  Noting Crusher’s use of the qualifier “Vulcan” in reference to the word “patient,” I seized on it to direct the conversation away from a potential discussion of the differences between me and “my people.” “Others have fallen ill? Non-Vulcans?”

  “Whoever designed this organism is a genius.” Crusher held one of the padds up for me to see. I recognized the diagram as a simplified representation of a Vulcan ribosome. The diagram became animated and I watched as the tiny chemical factory functioned in normal mode. Then, after a few seconds, tiny foreign bodies attached themselves and the action of the ribosome began accelerating. Studying the structure descriptions in the margin, I concluded, “Proteins inimical to iron-based life-forms.”

  Bashir nodded. “Give the girl a cookie.”

  It was an indication of how badly my blood sugar was depleted that I very badly wanted the cookie Bashir felt I deserved.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Bad enough,” Crusher said. “But not deadly. Not yet. I don’t think it was meant to be. These proteins weren’t meant to kill humans or Bajorans or Centaurians…well, you know. The rest of us. They were only meant to make us very, very sick.”

  “And it is unbelievably contagious,” Bashir added. “Airborne. Travels like flu. Symptoms develop in less than twenty-six hours and then you’re down.”