“We anticipate secondary—

  “—and tertiary—”

  “—infections could start within the day as those immune systems fighting the Vulcan protein become run down, and thus vulnerable to opportunistic viruses and bacteria. We’re prepared for everything from the garden-variety pneumonias that can be cured with a hypo to cases of cellular failure that aren’t so easily diagnosed.”

  Bashir and Crusher exchanged weary, worried looks.

  “How have you two managed to avoid being infected?”

  When Bashir grinned, I could see his gums were a sickly shade of gray. “Who says we have? We have the organism in our systems, but it doesn’t seem to like my genetically altered system quite as much.” He glanced at his colleague who was, I saw, sagged against the biobed beside my own, the one I imagine Stok must have occupied. “She’s just pumped full of antivirals, antibacterials, and—what was that other stuff?”

  “Turkish coffee,” Crusher said. “Nothing else can coexist with it in my bloodstream.”

  Bashir snorted, and it was sign of how tired he was that the little laugh turned into a fit of giggles. Crusher tried to glare him into submission, but she was just as exhausted as Bashir and gave in, though guiltily, to laughter. I, of course, maintained my reserve.

  Crusher regained her composure sooner than Bashir and, trying to ignore the sniggering doctor, turned her attention back to me. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  I conducted a swift personal inventory. “Achy. My joints are sore and my eyes feel dry. I believe I have an elevated temperature.” Crusher nodded, all of this consistent with what she knew already. “I’m hungry, but I also feel queasy. Is that consistent with your findings?”

  Bashir, calm again, nodded. “It’s part of the continuum of symptoms we’re seeing. You’re lucky you haven’t succumbed to the hallucinations some of the others have had.”

  “We found one of the Damask Plain’s officers attempting to claw his way out of a stasis chamber. His fingers were broken and bleeding before we sedated him,” Crusher said.

  “Obviously, you have some kind of resistance to the organism, though not complete immunity. We need to find out why. Here,” he said, handing me a set of sterile-wrapped specimen containers.

  I attempted to maintain a neutral expression. “What would you like me to do with these?”

  “Take specimens. Run tests.”

  I willed my slamming heart to slow as the ramifications of my present situation settled in. Because of my illness, Starfleet might have in their possession irrefutable proof that they had a Romulan operative working in their midst. I pushed back the veils of bleary sickness and grasped hold of my training. “You have not already run the…?” my voice trailed off. I steeled myself for the answer.

  Bashir sighed. “Beyond the crew of the Damask Plain, we’ve spent the last two days running tests on the more than five hundred individuals of twenty different species who’ve become symptomatic. There are another three hundred aboard the Enterprise in quarantine. We haven’t had the time or the staff to do anything beyond identifying the presence of the organism in your bloodstream. When we discovered that you’d fallen ill, we followed the protocol we’d developed for the other Vulcans.”

  “Sorry,” Crusher offered. “I know your work would go more quickly if you had a body of data to work with. If you think it will help, you’ll have access to what we’ve discovered in working on the Damask’s crew. We have all their sub-cellular profiles in the infirmary records.”

  Bashir checked his wrist chrono. “We’ll meet in a few hours, Seret, and go over your findings then.”

  “You can use the workstation in the remote isolation unit,” Crusher said. “Since all the Vulcans are in stasis at this point, it’s relatively quiet down there. And the EMH will be available to answer any questions you might have.”

  I studied her face and saw guilelessness. How could I help but stare at them with incredulity! Questions? Questions? Like how I can deceive the computer into believing that a Romulan is a Vulcan?

  Now I laugh bitterly as I recall the absurdity of the doctors’ proposal. Thankfully, they would have attributed any oddities in my behavior to my illness. I know they found nothing out of the ordinary in how I comported myself or I wouldn’t be sitting here now, making yet another journal entry. Still…how did I manage to survive without exposing myself?

  In that moment, chaotic bits of information tumbled about in my head; I struggled to find a discernable pattern. What was Tal Shiar training, what was medical training, what was Seret, what was that other person, the person who lived beneath the surface of Seret, who was attempting to peer out from behind these mirror eyes? I attempted to grasp for a recognizable piece of the puzzle only to have it fade, recede from memory. Struggling to discern what information was useless and what was critical to preserving my mission, I considered the known issues before me.

  Bashir and Crusher wanted me to run comprehensive cellular diagnostics on myself in the hopes that I would discover the secret to my resistance to the infection. I know what the tests would tell them: I’m resistant to the organism because Romulan ribosomes are different from Vulcan ribosomes. Nothing spectacular there if you don’t count treachery, which, somehow, I think they might.

  The doctors are allowing me to run these diagnostics because they have an unmanageable patient load and a scarcity of resources.

  They trust me to do my job.

  If I want to avoid captivity—by either side—I only needed to exit this infirmary. I could then devise an escape plan.

  “Seret?” Bashir asked.

  I started, suddenly aware that I had been lost in my thoughts.

  “Do you need more time? Are your symptoms getting worse?”

  “You’re releasing me,” I stated, making sure I understood their intentions. I didn’t dare hope that circumstances could have unfolded so perfectly.

  Crusher glanced at Bashir, who stared blankly back at her. Finally, she said, “You’re not that sick. Compared to most of the staff, you’re looking pretty good. Compared to all the other Vulcans, you’re a picture of rosy-cheeked good health.”

  Her combadge chirped. A voice I did not recognize said, “Enterprise to Crusher.”

  “Go ahead, Data.”

  “Doctor, we have patched in that call from Earth. Do you wish to return to the Enterprise to take it?”

  Crusher glanced at Bashir. “Your office?”

  Standing up quickly, Dr. Bashir straightened his tunic and said, “Certainly.”

  “Push it through to the infirmary’s main office, Data. We’ll take it there.”

  “Certainly, Doctor.”

  “Come with us, Seret,” Bashir said.

  Close, I thought. So close…

  The two of them helped me stand and I was surprised to find that I was not nearly as wobbly as I had anticipated being. In fact, except for the noticeable emptiness in the pit of my stomach (raw steak, here I come) and a slight lightheadedness, I felt almost well, better even than when I had fallen asleep two days earlier. Realizing that this might not be the best image to present, I leaned rather more heavily than necessary on Bashir’s arm, which turned out to be an error. We would have fallen together in a heap on the ground if Dr. Crusher had not counter-balanced us on my other side. Turkish coffee—whatever that was—seemed to be an effective fortifying agent. I shall remember to mention it to the Tal Shiar.

  The infirmary’s main hall remained as congested as it had been during my last shift. Several of my busy colleagues paused mid-workload to offer a smile or otherwise greet me and I found myself surprisingly touched by their concern. I noticed their rumpled uniforms, the intermittent sniffing, how they rubbed at their bloodshot eyes with their fists and supported their body weight by leaning against their workstations. Most of them looked weary or ill or a combination of the two, but none so much as Bashir or Crusher. Now that I had the opportunity to compare, the doctors’ hunched postures and pallid complexions had more in common with several morgue residents I’d examined than their obviously sick and drooping staff. The head doctors had obviously been pushing themselves harder than anyone.

  And I have to confess surprise at this realization. I am not accustomed to those in seniority taking on tasks requiring menial drudgery. Such duties are consigned to those of lesser rank—those whose health and energy are expendable. Highly skilled personnel are kept in reserve for occasions more befitting their status. I do not find this way—Starfleet Medical’s way—of conducting their operations as repugnant as I should. In fact, I consider the behavior of Drs. Crusher and Bashir…meritorious. Why is that? There was nothing remotely glorious about the scene that I witnessed.

  Patients from dozens of worlds squeezed into every available nook—on exam tables, seated in the waiting room, stretched out on the floor—everywhere. None of them looked to be at death’s door, but all evinced the same pale complexion, their eyes rheumy, noses running, coughing, or shivering. As Crusher had said, the disease created by the Vulcan ribosome did not kill, but the misery it caused was enough that those afflicted would wish they were dead.

  Surprisingly, I saw that the disease’s discomforts had obliterated the usual cultural prejudices and annoyances that kept species from mingling. Garak, the tailor, sat on the floor next to Quark, the two of them grudgingly sharing a blanket. I watched as one (Quark) would tug at the blanket, trying to secure more covering for himself; a moment later, the other (Garak) would tug back. Nearby, I saw my friend Morn—the only person on the station whom I’ve felt an intellectual kinship with—stretched out on a half-collapsed cot, a fleck of drool running down his face as he slept.

  “Dr. Bashir,” Quark rasped as we toddled past him. “When is someone going to see me?”

  “Did you take a number when you walked in, Quark?”

  Quark glanced at a tiny slip of paper in his hand. “Well, yes, but I didn’t know what it was, so I traded mine to someone else. I assumed you were running some kind of raffle.”

  “Traded?” Bashir asked.

  “All right. Sold.”

  “Have you been through triage?”

  “If you mean did someone wave one of your magic wands over me and pronounce me ‘Not all that sick,’ then yes.”

  “You’ll be seen when the medics have time, Quark. We have a lot of sick people here on the station and the disease doesn’t seem as fond of Ferengi as it does some of the others.” He nodded in Morn’s direction.

  “It seems inordinately fond of my mucus membranes, Doctor,” Quark whined. “I think I’ve blown about a gallon of snot out of my nose in the last half hour.”

  Bashir lost his patience. “Then you should bottle it, Quark, then sell it at the bar as a rare unguent.” This was clearly the last thing he wished to say on the subject and continued to shuffle on his way. I took a quick look over my shoulder and saw an expression on Quark’s face that made me think to that I should look very carefully at whatever sauce he put on the vegetarian lasagna the next time I ate at his restaurant.

  In Bashir’s office, he turned the monitor on his desk to face the pair of chairs he kept for guests, then rolled his own rather larger chair around so he could sit with us. When he was seated (with a palpable sigh of relief, I noticed), Dr. Crusher tapped her combadge and said, “Data, we’re in the office. Put the call through.”

  “Affirmative, Doctor.”

  Moments later, the monitor came to life, and I found myself staring at the most elderly human I believe I have ever seen or, for that matter, may have ever lived. Tangled wisps of white hair trailed down around his ears and over his high forehead giving him an unkempt, ragged appearance. Below, his face was a mass of sagging flesh, the skin around his eyes so loose and wrinkled that I wondered how he could see out from the folds. Then, catching sight of us, he cocked his head to the side and his left eyebrow climbed halfway up his forehead. Light fell on his eyes and they flashed a deep, sparkling blue that made me think simultaneously of deep water and, oddly, my mother’s father, a man whose name has been taken from me, but whose visage I still remember from the days of my youth.

  “There you are,” the old man said, though it sounded more to my untrained ears like he was saying “Tha-ya you awre.” His words came out so thickly, like he had paste in his mouth, that I thought he must suffer from some sort of neurological damage, though later I learned that this was not the case. Leonard McCoy—for that was who he was—comes from a region on Earth where everyone talks in this manner. “I was beginning to think y’all had forgotten about me.”

  “No, Leonard,” Dr. Crusher said. “Our apologies. It’s difficult to get from one place to the next with so many patients about.”

  McCoy moved his head very slowly in a motion I took to be a nod, then said, “Understood, Bev. It’s getting pretty bad?” He phrased this as a question, but I felt certain that there was no uncertainty in his mind.

  “Bad, yes. I’m running out of ideas. If we don’t do something soon, Jean-Luc will be forced to quarantine the station and probably have to put half a dozen ships through an extensive sterilization procedure. With the war on…”

  “Yeah, I believe I’ve heard something about that. Be a shame to take all those ships out of the fight.”

  “Your theory about the ribosome was correct, Admiral,” Bashir interjected.

  “ ’Course it was,” McCoy grumbled. “Only thing that made any sense. Bastards who thought of that little trick…”

  “That’s why we’re fighting them, Leonard,” Crusher said. Two observations prodded me. The first was that McCoy, despite his advanced years, was both technically brilliant and also insightful. The second was that he was obviously a person that required careful management. Crusher knew the trick of it, while Bashir did not. “Have you had time to review my notes about the agent manufactured by the RNA clusters?”

  “Yeah, I read it. Good work, Bev, but I think you’re headed down the wrong road there. We can’t stop this thing from doing its job. There’s already too many of them and they’re everywhere in the station, probably into other ships, too. Biofilters wouldn’t have stopped it. Slippery little sneaks, they are.”

  “Then vaccination,” Bashir said tersely.

  “Only way,” McCoy said as if there was nothing else to say. “I assume this is your Vulcan who recovered.”

  “Yes, this is Seret.”

  McCoy glared at me through his bushy eyebrows. “You a full Vulcan, m’dear?”

  The question took me aback. At worst, I anticipated being asked if I were a Romulan. At best, I was expecting to spend the afternoon attempting to fabricate test results while at the same time planning an escape route. I wasn’t anticipating being asked if I was a partial Vulcan.

  “Of course she is, Leonard,” Crusher said. “Vulcans don’t inter-breed with other species.”

  McCoy’s eyebrow crept up his forehead again like an irate caterpillar.

  Crusher rolled her eyes. “Except in rare instances.”

  “Better,” McCoy said, somewhat smugly. “We going to do some tests on her?”

  “She’s going to do some tests on her,” Crusher said. “We’re fortunate in that she’s one of the best technicians in the service, or so says Julian.”

  Studying Bashir, McCoy asked, “You the genetically altered boy?”

  Bashir attempted to look as dignified as he could, but knew there was no way to dodge such a straightforward question. “I am,” he said.

  “Don’t know what all the fuss was about,” McCoy said, his tone softening. “You don’t look like you’re about to grow a third arm.”

  “No, Admiral,” Bashir said, a smile creeping onto his face.

  “Though I used to know a fella that had a third arm. Seemed to do just fine with it.”

  “I…see. Well, well…”

  “You should get some sleep, son. You look tired.”

  Now Bashir grinned and rubbed his eyes. “You have me there, sir. I’ll see what I can do when this is all over.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir,’ boy. Or Admiral. I’m just an old country doctor. Bev tells me you’re pretty good.”

  When he lowered his hand, I could see that Bashir basked in the man’s praise. I’ve only known the doctor for a couple of years and I would not say that we have been socially intimate, but I knew him well enough to know he had a high opinion—justifiably, I might add—of himself. It was a rare thing to see him, as he was that moment, sincerely enjoying a compliment. “Thank you, sir,” he stammered. “I mean…Doctor. That’s…You’re very kind.”

  “Fine,” the old man said. “Now we’ve got that out of the way, get to work on that vaccine.”

  “We will.”

  McCoy mused for a moment and I wondered if he had lost focus on the conversation as the elderly sometimes do. Then he remarked, “Seems to me I remember reading something about a situation similar to this one from before my time, which means, naturally, that it’s ancient history to you. What kinda database depth you got there, Bev?”

  “The Enterprise has the full Starfleet medical database, of course,” Crusher replied.

  “Anything pre-Federation?”

  Crusher considered. “Perhaps. I’ll need to check with Data.”

  “Do that,” McCoy said. “Medicine didn’t start in the twenty-third century, despite what some folks think.”

  “Yes, Leonard.”

  “And Bev?”

  “Yes, Leonard?”

  “Tell our Mr. Data that if he doesn’t send me his next chess move I’m going to forget all about the game.”

  Crusher smiled. “I’ll mention it to him. He’s been rather busy…”

  “He’s an android, Bev. He can multitask.”

  “Right. I’ll remind him.”

  Then, the kindly old man disappeared again and the gruff old professional took his place again. “All right. That’s enough foolin’ around now. You people are back on the clock. Get to work.”

  Bashir and Crusher stared at the blank screen for several seconds. Finally, Bashir turned to her and asked, “So you worked with him for how many years at Starfleet Medical?”