Chapter Text
It’s easy to say that they’ll have a better idea in the next few hours. It’s also easy to tell her assistants that they all will be best served by rest while the sequencers work, teasing out which alterations of base pairs will have what effects.
It is much more difficult to make herself leave Sickbay after them, the low-level distress of the crew oppressive around her.
“How is she?”
An example of that distress greets her a few steps down the hall from Sickbay in the form of the short human with extensive cybernetics. She recognizes him from the briefing, the chief engineer. He is not pleasant to be around; jagged misery, painfully open.
“Boz wouldn’t let me keep Gull in the medbay to keep an eye on her -” he gestures up to a floating drone - “so …”
“She is in good spirits, though the prognosis remains uncertain.” She does not mention that the uncertainty in the prognosis is whether they have days or weeks to find a treatment. She tries to remember what his uniform and rank pips mean. Learning Starfleet uniform codes has never been a priority for her. “We have not been officially introduced. You are…?”
“Lt. Commander Piper Hawthorne,” he gives her a quick nod by way of belated greeting, and gestures up at the drone again, “Gull. I’m Chief Engineer. I’m. Cap is a friend.”
“I am Dr. T’Volis, of the Vulcan Academy of Sciences,” she says, a courtesy - he already knows this from the briefing. It takes her a moment to realize he means Diane–it is an odd nickname. “I am glad she has friends here.”
She’ll need them. If she survives. The thought is painful. T’Volis has seen this coming, and she had hoped it would attenuate the pain. It has not. If anything, the dread and the waiting has worsened it.
He lets out a slight snort. “I - well, I’m not the kind of guy who has much in the way of friends, but she’s. Well, she’s Cap’. She’s got plenty of friends here, and everyone else is pulling for her.”
“Your assistance is appreciated,” she says. Even if it is simply keeping Diane company.
Hawthorne waves an arm and starts walking. “Is there - is there anything else you can tell me? If there’s anything I or anyone on this ship could be doing -”
“There is nothing that can be done for her that is not already being done. The enhanced capacity of your laboratory facilities and staff have proven particularly useful.” She pauses. Humans value social interaction extremely highly. “Regular visits are encouraged, but do not expect a high level of interaction. The damage is…considerable.”
His face goes blank briefly, and then he snorts, “Yeah, I think Tyrell might try and kill me if I visit much more than I have. Glad the labs are doing their job at least.” He looks at her, very seriously. “The second anything else could be done, ask for it, no matter what it is. I know humans are prone to platitudes, but that statement is very literal.”
“It is appreciated.” She assesses him. “You and Captain Chester have been friends for some time, I take it.”
“Long enough to be a little too used to visiting her in sickbay. And to know she’s very, very good at surviving when no one would have any right to expect it.” There’s a quirk in his expression. “I was checking on who Tyrell had called in, and realized that she had mentioned your name. I’m glad the person Tyrell called in is someone she trusts.”
T’Volis realizes she hasn’t expected to be classified as someone Diane trusts, and that it matters perhaps more than it should. “She has always had an increased tolerance for risk.”
He snorts. “That’s a way to put it.” He adds, “I know you briefed us, but - from your assessment, what are the odds the virus was actually Dominion?”
T’Volis weighs her response. “Virtually nonexistent. It does not fit Dominion biogenic weapons profiles. Those are efficient. This one is personal, aimed to strike points of sensitivity in Terran psychology and history. It does not attack the Federation, but humanity specifically.”
He doesn’t look surprised. “To clarify - how specific? Humanity? Or her ?”
“Humanity,” she says. “Should she have a specific enemy,” and Diane has always been good at making enemies, incredibly good, but T’Volis doubts she is that good, to have someone design a biological weapon specifically to deal with her, “it is one that is happy to wipe out an entire species to eliminate her. I imagine that list, should it exist, is short. Even with her talents.”
“Short but maybe not zero,” he shakes his head. “Does it match any patterns with biogenic weapons you’ve seen before?”
“You have a hypothesis?” She raises an eyebrow at him. “The psychological element of this weapon–humanity’s experiences with genetic modification–is likely to be particularly ineffective for her; she has always had considerably less of a horror of it than the baseline for your species.”
“Yeah, because she has some goddamn sense,” he mutters, before continuing more clearly. “There’s a Cardassian splinter group that’s been active in the quadrant, called the True Way. They were the ones who jumped us. I wouldn’t have thought bioweapons would be their style - I think their leader would rather see Cap’ die face to face, not that we’d let that happen - but…” he tilts his head, eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t think they’d frame it as the Dominion. I think they’d want credit. But J’etris is the tactician, and she knows Cap.”
The way he mentions someone wanting to see Diane die face to face so casually, as an accepted fact, is profoundly unsettling. “This individual has wanted to kill her for some time,” she states, before she can help herself. Then she adds, “Regardless, I doubt a splinter group would create such an agent. This is decades of dedicated work, and enormous resources. This True Way seems unlikely to muster the necessary tools, but perhaps they might have used someone else’s existing invention.”
He frowns, considering, and nods.
“I…have not remained current with her activities,” she admits. “Tell me, is she…”
There are possibilities to end that sentence. But T’Volis falls silent, because there are simply too many options. Is she content? Is she often in this kind of danger? How has she made so many enemies? Has she been injured often?
After an uncomfortable pause, she says instead, “The Romulan liaison officer seems concerned about her. Do you trust him?”
Hawthorne snorts. “Absolutely not. But it doesn’t surprise me that he’s playing concerned. Whatever the Tal Shiar’s game is, they definitely have him trying very hard to get on her good side.”
Subcommander Tanek has made an overt show of his dislike. It was almost as demonstrative as a human. The way he’d reacted to the news of the gravity of the illness, however…
That was the first thing he did that appeared unstudied.
She puts it aside. The emotional reactions of a Romulan spy are of no relevance to the problem at hand.
Diane tries to get out of bed the next morning, and fails. She gets as far as swinging her feet to the floor, tries to push herself to her feet, and folds over herself. When she forces herself to sit upright again, all the color has gone out of her face.
T’Volis helps her back into the bed. Diane says nothing, not even a joke to diffuse the situation, her expression turned inward and closed off. T’Volis gives her an analgesic and, after scanning her, a muscle relaxant; there are transient spasms, building in force.
After far, far too long, she lets out a long breath and her shoulders relax. From the readings on the biobed, heart rate and cortisol levels, she’s still in significant pain. But her breathing evens anyway. “Thanks,” she rasps. T’Volis rests a hand on her shoulder, and wishes the gauntlet of the protective suit weren’t between them. Humans value physical touch, and physical touch mediated by adaptive mesh and polymers isn’t the same. “I will give you a second dose in ten minutes,” she tells Diane. “It should address the remaining discomfort.”
“Sounds good to me,” manages Diane. She swallows hard, looking gaunt and tired. “No prizes for machismo here, I guess.”
“No,” says T’Volis. “There are not.”
“I’m glad you came,” says Diane, still searching her face, as if the faceplate doesn’t matter. “I know what it must have cost you. I know you were worried this would happen.”
“I was concerned it might happen when I had no way of assisting you,” says T’Volis. “It is a common logical fallacy among sentient beings, but having some measure of involvement in at least attempting to assist you is easier to bear than having nothing to do whatsoever, regardless of ultimate outcome.”
Diane reaches up to put her hand over T’Volis’s. “That’s incredibly sweet of you.”
T’Volis is touched, but she also wishes that Diane would stop this facade. She is dying. She does not need to play the part of the perfect officer even on her deathbed.
“I feel like an idiot,” Diane says to the air after a few minutes longer. “We knew that lab wasn’t exactly secret, and we knew Cardassian dissidents were sniffing around, and yet, I didn’t put two and two together. And so we were all caught unawares and unprepared when they showed up and hit the planet.”
“I do not think it reasonable to lambaste yourself for an exposure that occurred as the result of enemy action,” says T’Volis. “Logically, your enemy attacked in such a way precisely because it would be difficult to anticipate.”
Diane grimaces, moving an arm to cradle her neck, where another spasm forms. “Yeah, but if it happened because I was stupid, it means it was under my control. I’d very much like this to have been under my control.”
“As I noted earlier, that is a logical fallacy.”
“Ah. At least we can be illogical together.” The note of pain in her voice takes any humor out of it.
Are you happy? T’Volis wants to ask. Was this worth it? Is this life all you wanted? But the questions will cause harm, they will be for her own gratification alone, and so she won’t ask them. “Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable in the meantime? Something to read, or perhaps music?”
“Ugh.” Diane closes her eyes. “No, not really–definitely not music, my head feels like it’s about to split open anyway.”
T’Volis frowns, checking her readings and then flipping open her tricorder to scan her. She finds what she dreaded; a rapid fluid buildup around the brain. Something else has failed. “T’Volis to Tyrell, prep for emergency surgery. Diane, I need to sedate you.”
“Not just a headache, huh?” Diane says, or tries to say, and tilts her head to let T’Volis sedate her.
It is particularly horrible, how her face relaxes so much as she slips into unconsiousness, the pain washing out of it.