Forged in Fire Read online

  “You need medical attention,” Sulu said. “Let me get you some help.”

  Her gaze focused upon him again. “It won’t make any difference,” she said with vocal cords that sounded as dry as kindling. “The virus has already gone too far, you see.” She chuckled, then coughed.

  “Let’s see what Doctor Klass has to say about that.” Sulu reached for his communicator and flipped it open.

  She reached out with surprising strength and speed, seizing Sulu’s hand and forcing the communicator’s grid back down into the closed position. “It’s already too late for me,” she said. “But you can stop him. He has to be stopped.”

  Gently but firmly, Sulu disengaged his hand from her iron grip, pulling the communicator out of her grasp. Her hands felt cold and rough, like granite carvings spattered with icy rain. He felt chilled to his core, though he wasn’t sure whether the woman’s touch or the obvious nearness of death was responsible.

  “Who has to be stopped?” Sulu said.

  “The man who has forced me to . . . serve him,” she said haltingly, her eyes turning alternately bright and dim as though she were struggling to maintain consciousness. “The white pirate. The man who plans . . . plans to attack the Korvat colony.”

  “You’re a slave?” Sulu had nothing but contempt for slavery and anyone who profited from it. The institution violated every principle of the Federation. Of course, the rough outpost of Galdonterre was hardly a stronghold of Federation law and tradition. And Starfleet’s sacrosanct directive of noninterference with alien societies effectively prevented him from doing very much about humanitarian outrages such as this.

  At least most of the time.

  “He captured me during one of his raids,” she said, her words slurring. The stream of sweat on her face was fast becoming a torrent, and was doubtless liberally mixed with tears. “Many years ago.”

  “You’ll be safe aboard Excelsior.” Sulu found it hard to imagine even the sometimes-supercilious Captain Styles refusing an asylum request from an escaped slave.

  The woman coughed, her throat rasping with the sounds of dry leaves and ragged burlap. “No place will be safe for me — not since he put the virus in my veins.”

  “Virus?” Sulu said, horrified. “Are you saying you were forced to work for someone who uses . . .disease organisms against the people he’s enslaved?”

  She nodded, then withdrew a small, sweat-dripping medical scanner from her loose-fitting traveler’s cloak. “Yes. Individually . . . tailored viruses. Designed specifically for each of his slaves. To keep us . . . in line . . .”

  She trailed off, her gaze briefly losing its focus again before her fitful lucidity once again returned. “I’ve been scanning visitors to this world for weeks now. Looking for . . . antibodies to the virus I carry. You look like the most promising potential source I’ve scanned so far. A pity . . . it’s already too late. But it’s not too late . . . to warn you.”

  “Warn me?” Though he was no longer touching her hands, the earlier sensation of extreme cold returned, this time coursing up and down along the length of his spine.

  “Warn you,” she repeated, then interrupted herself with a mad, rasping giggle. “After all, what can he do about it? Kill me?”

  “What do you need to warn me about?” Sulu asked, trying to keep her focused.

  “About . . . about Korvat,” she croaked. Her perspiration was intensifying, and Sulu sensed that she was fading fast. Now that he knew she might be carrying a genetically engineered virus of some sort, he was no longer quite so eager as before to get her aboard Excelsior, where others might be exposed to whatever disease was consuming her.

  “You mentioned Korvat before,” he said. “Is your . . . employer planning to stage another one of his raids there?”

  She shook her head. “Not merely . . . a raid. He wants . . . to shut down . . . the peace conference . . . between your people and his.”

  The border world known as the Korvat colony, Sulu knew, would soon play host to high-level Federation-Klingon diplomatic talks. So this slaver, this pirate, is evidently a Klingon, he thought.

  “Why do you call him ‘the white pirate’?” he said aloud.

  “Because . . . because his skin looks like the winter snows back home in Janitza Province.”

  The chill sensation seized his spine once again as he considered the woman’s description — along with some very old ghosts that still haunted his dreams, at least on occasion.

  Sulu tried to focus past his own personal ruminations, since this wasn’t the time to indulge them. “Tell me more about Korvat,” he said, signaling to his companions with a wave of a hand. A quick backward glance confirmed that the entire group was rising from the table and approaching. “Why does this . . . white pirate want to disrupt the peace talks?”

  The woman’s reply was punctuated by her labored, wheezing breaths. “Peace along the border zone is . . . bad for the albino’s business. So he must thwart that peace.”

  Sulu was immediately inclined to take the woman’s warning seriously. After all, the schedule for the upcoming session of Federation-Klingon talks hadn’t been finalized until shortly before Christmas, and the existence of the conference itself was not yet generally known. The talks might even have been part of the reason that Starfleet had dispatched Excelsior to this general region of Beta Quadrant space.

  Schulman was the first to reach the alcove, her tricorder already out and scanning the stricken alien woman. The others gathered around, earnest expressions of concern etched across their faces. Startled by the new arrivals, the woman reached toward Sulu, who instinctively took the alien woman’s frigid hand and squeezed it gently, offering whatever solace he could manage. With his other hand, he raised his communicator again.

  “I can still get some of our medics down here,” he said. He had no doubt that just about any member of the sickbay staff, including Dr. Klass herself, wouldn’t hesitate to volunteer to beam down with an emergency medkit, despite the obvious danger of contagion.

  But the silent, unmistakable look of resignation on the woman’s face made plain the meat-hook reality of her imminent death.

  Then, right before Sulu’s nonplussed eyes, and in full view of the entire shore-leave party, the woman’s body ceased perspiring, her skin abruptly taking on the texture and color of dry, weathered quartz. Even as Sulu realized that she must already be dead, the visible portions of the woman’s flesh turned translucent, transforming into faceted, crystalline material, metamorphosed as though by some wizard’s terrible and arcane alchemy. A few heartbeats later, what remained of her lifeless body adopted a granular texture and instantly began to crumble like a sand castle dried out in the sun. The woman’s garment maintained her shape for perhaps another second or two until gravity and her own collapsing remains conspired to pull it all down to the stone floor beneath the bench. Within the space of perhaps twenty horror-charged seconds, the woman’s disease had reduced her to a few handfuls of white, desiccated crystals.

  I’ve seen this before, Sulu thought, speechless, his heart in his throat. Though more than three decades had passed since he’d last witnessed such an obscenity, there could be no mistaking — to say nothing of forgetting — the rare malady that had taken the lives of a Federation starship’s entire crew.

  “Looks like some form of flash-dehydration, Commander,” Braun said, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

  Sulu nodded silently, a hard lump of carefully modulated fear forming in his throat. This is how everybody on the Exeter died. After they came back from Omega IV, with a native airborne virus tagging along for the ride.

  And everyone here had more than likely already inhaled the pathogen, if this was indeed the same thing.

  Sulu started when he heard a screeching roar behind him, followed quickly by another. He whirled to see a trio of young Gorn shrinking away from the carnage, upending a nearby vacant table as they hastened to put some distance between themselves and the few spadefuls of hor
ror that now adorned the floor. They must have seen what just happened, he thought, almost grateful for the distraction from the terror that he and his people had just witnessed.

  “Commander, we may have a bit of a problem,” Renyck said. “If the other customers get it into their heads that we killed this woman . . .”

  But Sulu knew that the Gorn wouldn’t be highly motivated to make trouble with the planetary authorities, or even to alert the bartender, whom Sulu doubted would deign to give the screeching, retreating reptiloids so much as an annoyed glance. Moving with uncharacteristic swiftness, the Gorn headed toward the door, their tails held rigidly behind them. Must be heading right back to the Hegemony, Sulu thought. He saw another man watching the alcove where the dead woman lay, but when he caught Sulu’s eye, he ducked out the door as well.

  Sulu’s impulse was to prevent anyone from leaving, establishing a de facto quarantine. But until he knew for certain what he was really dealing with here, he knew he couldn’t justify taking any such action.

  Putting aside his own revulsion and fear, he turned back to face his shaken, ashen-hued shipmates. “Form a tight ring around me, but try to avoid looking suspicious. We need to find out what really happened here before things get out of hand.”

  He turned to Schulman. “Do you have a specimen container in your kit?” He was grateful that the junior science officer always took an exploratory kit with her whenever she ventured off-ship, even during her shore leaves; he made a mental note to commend her later for that.

  “I do, sir,” she said as she extracted a small tube made of clear plastic. She unstoppered it and held it out toward him.

  “I’ll scoop up a sample of the . . . remains,” Sulu said. He decided that if whatever had killed this woman turned out not to be transmitted through the air, then he was the only person who had been exposed thus far through direct physical contact; he was determined, if at all possible, to make whatever risk of exposure remained entirely his own.

  As he carefully scooped up some of the woman’s bone-dry remains, he reached for his communicator and flipped it open. “Sulu to Excelsior,” he said, raising his voice slightly to make himself heard over the barroom din.

  A few seconds later, the voice of Excelsior’s commanding officer issued from the communicator. “Styles here. You aren’t scheduled to check in for another four hours, Commander. Is anything wrong?”

  A wry smile tugged at the corners of Sulu’s mouth. “You might say that, sir,” Sulu said. “We may have been exposed to a potentially lethal contaminant. Possibly a strain of the Omega IV virus, or something similar. I have collected a specimen that will need to be analyzed immediately.”

  Several tense seconds elapsed before Styles replied. “I’ll have it beamed directly to the quarantine chamber in sickbay. Please put your communicator with the sample so we can establish a transporter lock.”

  Sulu didn’t have to wonder what the others were thinking at that moment, because he suspected it was exactly what was going through his mind as well. “Why not beam us all to quarantine, sir? Only six of us, at most, have potentially been exposed.”

  “I don’t want to take any chances with the health and safety of everyone else on Excelsior, Commander,” Styles said. “The Omega IV virus is nothing to take lightly. Until we know for certain what it is we’re dealing with, even placing the six of you in isolation poses a risk. You are all to consider yourselves under a planetary quarantine until further notice. Keep me apprised of any change in your status. Styles out.”

  Disappointed but not surprised by Styles’s conservative decision, Sulu set the open communicator down on the bench on which the dead woman had sat, taking care not to touch anything. Then he placed the specimen tube beside the communicator. A moment later the two items disappeared in a brief but brilliant shimmer of light.

  Braun was the next member of the group to speak. “This Omega IV virus. I take it there’s no known cure for it.” Even if it was phrased as a statement, it was obviously a question as well.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Schulman said softly. “At least not this side of Omega IV.”

  “We don’t know for sure that this is the Omega IV virus,” Sulu said quietly but firmly, hoping to buck up the group’s obviously flagging morale, in spite of his own gnawing doubts. Prime among these was the dying woman’s assertion that he, Hikaru Sulu, was the best potential source of antibodies she had found so far. Was this because his blood still carried both the pathogens and the immunizing factors to which he had been exposed when he had led an Enterprise rescue team on the surface of Omega IV?

  “Besides,” he continued with all the confidence he could muster, “the woman told me that the virus in her blood had been tailored specifically to affect her, in order to keep her under the control of a slaver. There’s no reason to assume that anybody else is at risk because of it.”

  But even as he watched his people nod, apparently encouraged, he couldn’t help but agree with Captain Styles’s choice not to wager Excelsior’s safety on such a slender chain of reasoning and wishful thinking.

  FOUR

  Stardate 8991.0 (Late 2289)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  Dr. Judith Klass frowned as she carefully and deftly manipulated the small sample vial that had been beamed into sickbay’s isolation chamber just minutes ago. Despite the sense of security the seals of isolation provided, working with any kind of potentially deadly virus demanded the strictest of protocols. There was no way she could risk handling the vial and its contents with either gloves or directed shielding; one microscopic tear in the hazmat gear, or a single energy fluctuation in the shields, might spell disaster. So she was back to utilizing retro-technology that seemed almost prehistoric on a ship as advanced as Excelsior.

  She toggled the controls to the right, gently nudging the robotic arm closer to the stopper at the top of the vial. She had trained with robotic arms like these at Starfleet Medical nearly forty years ago; later, when the first Horta biologist came to share his species’ biophysical knowledge, she had outfitted him with a set of arms very similar to these. Those had been controlled through the galvanometric currents generated on Flek’s rocky exterior, whereas the ones she was using now were controlled solely by her hand-eye coordination. It was akin to playing chess while using somebody else’s hands to move the pieces.

  As beads of sweat began to appear on her brow, Klass momentarily regretted having sent her two nurses out of sickbay, or at least not having donned a surgical cap. She willed herself to ignore the creeping droplets, steeling her concentration to remain focused on the task before her. The stopper successfully extracted, she moved the vial over to the left side of the chamber, where a sample slide was already prepped and waiting. With infinite patience, she tilted the vial, allowing a few grains of the white powder to spill onto the slide.

  From what she understood, those white grains had been part of a woman of undetermined alien origin not so very long ago. Sulu had said that she’d turned into the crystalline powder right before his eyes. Klass hoped, for his sake — and for the sake of the rest of the crew whom Styles had quarantined on Galdonterre — that the cause was not the Omega IV virus, as was feared.

  She liked Sulu, and had found him charming and gentlemanly from the time they had first met, when he had come in for his initial routine physical. She had read in his file that he had originally been a physicist; as she was examining him, she asked why he had transferred from the sciences to helm duty aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.

  “There’s more action in the driver’s seat,” he had responded jokingly. “I’ve never been happy cooped up in an office or a laboratory. I’d rather apply sciences directly, or test theoretical physics. Besides, if you knew Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy, you’d know that there wasn’t room on that ship for a third scientific opinion.”

  “Oh, I know Leonard,” Klass had said. “Smartest Georgia farm boy ever to make it offworld. I studied at St. George’s University in London; when he cam
e over for a semester as an exchange student from the University of Mississippi, he made himself known to every unattached girl on campus . . . and several attached ones as well.”

  Seeing Sulu’s incredulous look, Klass had laughed. “You probably don’t think of Lenny as being a lothario, do you? Well, I don’t know how successful he was with others, but he wasn’t exactly my type.”

  “Are you still on good terms with him?” Sulu had asked.

  “Well, I haven’t talked to him in ages, but I’d be happy to throw back a pint or two with him if the opportunity ever came up. I remember his tastes ran to Tennessee whiskey and mint juleps.”

  She had studied him for a moment, a realization suddenly dawning on her. “In answer to your unspoken question, yes, I would associate with Lenny, despite what certain others in the command hierarchy of this ship might feel,” she said, pointing to the ceiling, several decks above which was the bridge.

  Klass had leaned in closer, confiding in Sulu. “I’ve served on a host of different ships, Commander, and one thing I’ve learned in all that time is that those in command break down into a few camps. There are: number one, the ones who want to be friends with their crews and have adventures; number two, the ones who want to command their people and don’t much care about interpersonal stuff nor much of anything else that’s fun; and number three, those who are an awkward combination of both styles. Currently, Excelsior has a number two,” she said, smiling. “But if you do a good job, and stay away from your previous CO’s cowboy tendencies, you should be okay.”