Chapter Text
Dr. T’Volis, deputy chair of the Department of Infectious Disease at the Vulcan Academy of Sciences, is checking through her messages and carefully portioning out water to the collection of Terran phalaenopsis orchids that still reside around her home workstation. Two of them are showing buds and a possibility of flowering again, which is in itself remarkable, given that even indoor temperatures on Vulcan are at the far upper edge of their heat tolerance. She is examining one glossy green leaf when the call comes through.
Starfleet. High priority.
“Dr. T’Volis ,” says the male Trill on the other end, relief evident in his voice. T’Volis raises an eyebrow; for all the relief is strictly contained, it’s uncharacteristic for Dr. Tyrell, who has the arrogance on which so many human jokes about surgeons are based. “I’m glad to have reached you.”
It looks like it’s the middle of ship’s night for him, and like he has not slept for some time. “You have an emergency, and you require a consultation,” she states.
“Yes,” he says, and getting directly to the point when his pride is on the line indicates it must be dire indeed. “We responded to a request to clean up an abandoned Dominion military research laboratory. The evidence suggests that they were working on biogenic weapons. There was an attack.”
“And there has been an exposure of one of your crew.”
He nods. “Yes. There was. Captain Chester.”
For a moment, the world goes still and slow, and what has, so far, been a theoretical problem of intellectual interest becomes sharp pain. T’Volis composes herself, with more difficulty than she expected. “Has the pathogen been identified?”
“It’s entirely novel,” says Tyrell. “I…have made some progress in sequencing it. But given the uncertainty about disease course and virulence, bringing a specialist in seems wise. I can transmit the data to you–,”
“Do so. I will come to you.” It is a foolish thing to say, as she does not know where the Interpreter might be, but it is also unthinkable to do anything else. In her lab on Vulcan, she can run analyses, sequence the virus–but it will be delayed. And delay is something Diane–Captain Chester–cannot afford. Not with a biogenic weapon tearing through her body.
How did she come in contact with it? Diane’s tolerance for risk has always been high, her tendency toward self-sacrifice concerning, but she is not stupid. She would not have violated infection protocols, and she would not have gone into a biogenic weapons lab without them.
There was an attack , Tyrell said. Something outside of their control. Malice. Diane has also always been very good at making enemies.
“I’ll arrange it with Starfleet ,” says Tyrell. He does not look pleased; he wouldn’t, about having to bring another doctor in to manage a case, but some of the tension goes out of his shoulders. “ We’re already on our way back.”
It is a long way to Deep Space Nine, much less to the Gamma Quadrant. Diane may not have that long. T’Volis does not say it, because Tyrell already knows it, and it would only serve to air her own anxieties.
This is what she feared, she realizes as she ends the call and begins to make the necessary arrangements. This is what she drew back from, like pulling her hand away from a live heating element. One day, there would be a call like this, and it is bad enough now, when it is about a woman she still esteems–it would have been unimaginably worse, if it had been about her wife.
It was Sotek who introduced them.
T’Volis had spent most of her life unbonded; a childhood accident had taken her bondmate, and the feeling of abrupt unraveling and sudden, terrible silence had stayed with her since. She had not been sure she wanted to bond, to risk that again or to inflict it upon another–and it would happen, one day, to one or the other of them.
Sotek was one of her older cousins, one who had been kind in the wake of her loss, and also the one who understood her; she had known, intellectually, that there were men who bonded with men, and women with women, but she had also known the statistical frequency of such pairings and hadn’t thought she might be one of the latter until Sotek had spoken of his bonded, and she had found knowing someone like her brought her own inclinations into sudden sharp focus. After that, there was a degree of ease in being around Sotek that there was not elsewhere. He simply understood. Being understood in such a way was a very great relief.
Sotek’s husband also understood Sotek, and shortly after Sotek had earned his degree and been teaching and heading research for a time, Asil was the one to pick up on his discontent and accurately identify its cause. “You are bored,” he’d told Sotek bluntly one night. “Join Starfleet. The diversity of challenges will suit you, and the itinerant nature of the postings will curb this tendency to wander; it will be safer than your current approach.” Asil had both been right and painfully observant. Sotek did go for long walks on his own, and he did not attend to where he was going.
And Asil had continued to be right. T’Volis, beginning her own studies at that point, saw a great deal less of Sotek after that. When she did see him, he seemed settled. Content, even, as if a longing in him had been fed. And then, shortly after he was promoted to lieutenant, he came home with one of his colleagues.
“This is Lieutenant Diane Chester,” he’d said to T’Volis, and the tall handsome human next to him had not offered a handshake–as humans so often did to everyone’s excruciating embarrassment–but a bow, a bow that would have been correct even from another Vulcan. T’Volis returned it, and returned the look of interest. Lieutenant Chester was almost of a height with her cousin, with long black hair tied sensibly back, wide dark eyes, and a sharp-chinned face with a hint of sunburn coming up across the bridge of her nose. She seemed cheerful, but she wasn’t making the exaggerated show of it most humans did.
She was a lieutenant in communications, specialization in linguistics, history, and ethics. She was assigned to the Billings , hoping to become a specialist in First Contact. She was calm, steady, cheerful; had completed several internships with the Terran Embassy on Vulcan, hence her facility with the culture; came from a family large and tangled enough to almost qualify as a Vulcan clan; spoke Golic without the translator and with a tendency to slide back into the tonality of her native tongue, an old Earth language called Mandarin. She was at what T’Volis’s medical textbooks called ‘a developmentally analogous stage’ to T’Volis herself, and muffled her enormous amusement at this being pointed out with a ducked head and a hand briefly pressed over her mouth, which T’Volis found charming–both for the consideration attempted, and for its own sake.
There were, T’Volis realized, a great many things she found charming about this human. And Chester made it politely clear there were a great many things she found charming about T’Volis. Sotek had been so smug it bordered on rude.
There had been a tendency, as there was with most beings in Starfleet, to take illogical risks. T’Volis had not liked this, but endeavored to put up with it. A courtship with a human entailed certain things, and one of them was a greater appetite for risk-taking than most Vulcans would humor. As their relationship did not include many of the points of friction that most Vulcan/human relationships did, T’Volis told herself she would humor this, at least; she was courting a Starfleet officer, and these things were a given.
Starfleet sends a courier for them, all the laboratory supplies T’Volis can requisition; it also tries to give her a research team, but she insists on her own postdoctoral trainees. She picks them carefully. It is not skill she selects for; it’s calmness, ability to handle emergencies, the ones she thinks will be able to bear trauma. She spent the war studying Dominion biogenic weapons. Even if it all goes well, even if they do save their patient, it is too likely it will be an ugly illness and an ugly recovery.
She needs experienced researchers who will not flinch at what a pathogen can do to a humanoid body when it’s not cells on a slide, or forensics afterward, when it’s happening in front of them. These ones are young enough they didn’t see it during the war; T’Volis has. But it has not been someone close to her before.
Close to her. Diane–Captain Chester–are they still close? She is not sure. Her own investment in Chester’s wellbeing seems to argue that they are.
Chester did not often speak about the risks, but there were glimpses that T’Volis got, a news report here, an offhand comment there, Sotek mentioning something or other, and it had built a concerning picture.
Starfleet was a high-risk career. It selected for people willing to undertake those risks. Sotek was lucky, in that both he and Asil accepted those risks. Asil had joined him on many of his pre-war assignments. A starship suited Asil’s own research well.
A starship would have suited T’Volis’s research well, but not her preferences. She was perfectly willing to travel on them, and attend conferences on them, but the idea of living in an artificial bubble, surrounded only by artificial things in a vast and innately hostile environment, was profoundly unappealing. To be able to step outside, and walk among things that had been long before sentients had started to build, and would remain long after she herself was gone–it was fundamental to her. She had mentioned this to Chester, who loved the mountains and grasslands of her home in California in much the same way T’Volis did the Vulcan desert, and Chester had looked at her with gentle consternation and said, “I don’t see it as much different. The planets and stars are much the same. They’ve been here for eons, too.”
They weren’t the same, T’Volis had been certain about that, but had not been able to put it into words in a satisfactory way. Not enough to bring it up as a counterargument, at the very least. She wasn’t sure Diane would be capable of understanding in any case; there was a deep restlessness there, constant and insatiable. When Diane was still, it was the stillness of a coiled spring, energy repressed and held uncomfortably in check. She was at her best in motion, whether it was a simple camping trip, or waiting to board a shuttle back to her current ship, or undertaking a new project, and when she was still too long–usually only a matter of two of Earth’s short weeks–she stagnated, a graying moroseness coming into her mind that was difficult indeed to share a house with, let alone a bed.
T’Volis preferred hearth and home. She felt tense and on edge in space, found Earth pleasant enough, save for the cacophony of unshielded minds. It had occurred to her that this might pose difficulties in their relationship, and she asked one evening when they were coming close to the two-week mark, when Diane would become restive.
Diane looked up from where she was working on dinner, cleaning bok choi. They were an Earth vegetable some of the local growers were experimenting with, white and green, and the growing sense of restrained irritation from the kitchen had been setting T’Volis’s teeth on edge.
Diane raised her head and blinked at her from where she was pulling one of the vegetables apart. “Why would I find that difficult?” she asked, sounding a little blank. “You made your preferences perfectly clear. I’m not expecting you to uproot your life here and follow me.” And then at T’Volis’s steady look, realizing she hadn’t sufficiently addressed the question, “I like having a home to come back to, dear. When you’re out there, it’s good to have something to anchor you. Especially when everything goes to hell.”
“You are irritated,” T’Volis said. “I am concerned there may be more to this.”
Another blank look and blink and then a quiet huff of amusement. “Oh. That.” Diane raised a leaf of the bok choi, and made a face–demonstrative by Vulcan standards, mildly put upon by human. “Bugs. Your local insect life likes this stuff as much as I do. I was trying to avoid the extra protein.”
If Diane were so determined that it wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t something that could be productively pursued. T’Volis put it aside. It wasn’t that her life was devoid of excitement. It was a meticulous, careful sort of work, studying the universe’s most deadly pathogens, and in her time in the lab she spent a great deal of it in a full protective suit, working within a fume hood with unidentified samples, or identified samples hideously deadly to anything that should come in contact with them without benefit of extensive protective equipment. But her work wasn’t the reactive make-it-up-as-you-go that Sotek and Diane had described to her; it was slow and meticulous and carefully cognizant of the risks, and the procedures if those risks were realized. It was dangerous, but it was a quiet kind of danger, almost more in one’s own head; the risks of overconfidence.
Before the war, T’Volis had tried not to think too hard about those other dangers, of the risk of losing another partner. During the war, she lost that luxury.
She reads the files on the virus itself first, because viruses are simple. She scrutinizes the genetic sequence. The infection pathway. It’s based on an old Earth clade of viruses, long-evolved with humans and highly transmissible. Occasionally in Earth’s history, they’ve caused horrifying pandemics; she looks up the one in the early 21st century and finds herself wincing inwardly. Humans, and their appetite for risk.
“The virus does not display sequences from any known virulent pathogens,” says L’Nar, one of her three postdocs. “Including the very pathogen from whose lineage it descends; none of the clotting or severe pneumonia or neurological complications. There is something we are not seeing.”
“The patient is, so far, only displaying symptoms consistent with a mild respiratory infection,” says Meket. “Burden of care is not very high–at least not yet. Perhaps the infection is dose-dependent.”
“We had best hope not,” says T’Volis. “The patient was in the ruins of the lab for several hours after her EVA suit was breached and her atmospherics had finished venting. The location she reports waking in was adjacent to a collection of samples. There was ample exposure to a high dose of the infectious material.”
“Is it possible we are working with multiple pathogens?”
“This is the only one that has been identified.” There might be other pathogens. There are three research vessels en route now, under the guard of the Titan and the Armistice . The Armistice is Sotek’s ship. He must have heard the news; he must have taken it hard. He and Diane have remained friends.
The Interpreter is a day away. From this morning’s report, there is reason to hope that Diane will still be alive when they reach her. But the Dominion would not bother with a virus that only causes the symptoms they’re observing. There will be something else.