An Antares I class freighter lumbered slowly into the voluminous interior of the Canopus class starbase, guided by an experienced pilot from Archanis Station’s flight operations center. He thought nothing of the trip, this just one of a half dozen just like it that he’d conducted over the course of his shift, the only difference being that this one would be his last of the night.

Hangar operations personnel moved into position as the ship came to a halt and the umbilical clamped into place. According to the manifest, this freighter had originated from Acamar, and she was here on stopover before she’d continue her trip rimward. Owned by a civilian cargo corporation, she carried a mix of ore and other nonhazardous materials, along with a dozen passengers who’d booked passage for this leg of her journey. The Antares I didn’t offer the plush accommodations of commercial passenger liners, but it wasn’t unusual for it to ferry passengers. For some, the unusual legs it traversed provided convenience conventional lines didn’t offer, and for others, it was a cheap way to travel because operators typically charged low fares as they were making the trip anyway.

As the crew and passengers funneled off the ship, a Chief Petty Officer in yellow greeted them with a warm smile. “Welcome to Archanis Station. If you would please line up over here, we’ll get you all processed lickety split, and then you can get onto enjoying the shops and suites of our famed promenade!”

The chief and his team then went to work processing each of the new arrivals. Besides the freighter crew, there were three young men on a university sabbatical, a cute elderly couple off to explore the galaxy in their final years, a missionary from some far off world, and a random assortment of folks who seemed more down on their luck than anything else.

The last person off the shuttle was an elderly man. With a balding head and skin like aged leather, he squinted under the station’s bright lights as he approached. It had been a long time since he’d been somewhere so bright, so clean, and so Starfleet. Wordlessly and without looking up, he handed his identification to the boarding officer.

“Fred Kingsley,” the chief read off his PADD as he looked the man over. “What brings you to Archanis Station?” By his tattered clothes and the way he carried himself, the chief already had a sense for the answer that would follow.

“Just passing through,” the old man replied wearily, looking up at the boarding officer with tired eyes.

“Passing through on the way to where?” the chief asked, not out of suspicion, but just because it was part of the regular checklist.

“If only I knew,” the old man shrugged. “Wherever the galaxy takes me next, I guess? Once I get the credits to afford passage, of course.”

Ah, just another drifter, the chief thought to himself, and he noted it down as such. There were many like him out here, the sort who wandered from outpost to outpost, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. It was sad, but it was what it was. Out here on the frontier, life wasn’t as easy as it was in the core of the Federation. 

“Well, I wish you all the best with your time here,” the chief offered with a gentle smile as he handed the man’s identification back. “Enjoy your stay.”

And so off he went, the boarding officer none the wiser to who he really was or why he was really here.

“If there’s one thing you take from today, may it be that while the Underspace is closed to us for now, the learnings from recent events offer a glimpse at how we could, with further research, change the efficiency of superluminal travel by orders of magnitude,” Dr. Luke Lockwood offered as he drew his talk to a close. There was so much they’d learned from the labyrinth, so much that it had revealed. Now, all it would take is someone willing to close the gap, to take the mathematics and convert it to practice.

From the front row to the standing room in the back, the auditorium burst into applause. For a moment, he just stood there, taking it all in. It’d been far too long. The folk on the Polaris, they appreciated his genius for what it produced in the furtherance of its mission, but to be surrounded by his peers, actual scientists that could truly appreciate the brilliance of his mathematics, it was a delightful feeling.

As the applause died down, Ensign Snnar Vok, Dr. Lockwood’s colleague from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, approached. “Wow, doctor! Just wow! Where’d you ever learn the courage to speak to such a large room?” They spent their days playing with numbers in the lab, and the young subspace theorist clammed up even at the prospect of presenting to Fleet Admiral Reyes. To present to a room of over five hundred of the Federation’s most distinguished scientific minds, the idea was utterly terrifying.

“Back in the eighties, I used to fill a room many times this size,” Dr. Lockwood shared. Those had been the good old days, back when he held an endowed chair at the Daystrom Institute and served as an advisor to the Federation Science Council. “But I guess that’s neither here, nor there.” He was a department head on a Starfleet starship now, and as he’d been counseled many times, that meant his role was to offer guidance to those under him. “I guess what I can say is that, if your equations are accurate, let them do the talking. The math will set you free.”

That made some sense, Ensign Vok had to admit. “Maybe I’ll give it a shot, someday.”

“My friend, if you’ll remember, much of the math was yours,” Dr. Lockwood acknowledged. “When you’re ready, I’d welcome you to stand beside me on that stage.” A true academic, Dr. Lockwood had no issue crediting the works on top of which his were built. Those who described him as self-centered and egotistical were simply those who had nothing worth acknowledging.

Before either could say anything further, a woman approached. She, like Snnar Vok, wore the pips of an ensign, but as a human who appeared at least forty years of age, and a little sickly at that, Dr. Lockwood could infer from her attendance that she was most likely a researcher who came to the fleet later in life. They had a few like that within the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity on the Polaris, such as Lieutenant Sh’vot, a geophysicist with a prolific career at the Federation Terraforming Command before embracing the call of service, or Lieutenant Commander Linus Rhodes, who’d built a successful cybersecurity firm before enlisting in Starfleet. He appreciated the worldly knowledge they brought from the outside, the sort of stuff you could never learn at the Academy.

“Dr. Lockwood,” she smiled as she shook hands with Dr. Lockwood. “I’m Dr. Elizabeth Kynes with the Advanced Starship Design Bureau.”

Yes, definitely a scientist later turned officer, he thought to himself as she coughed lightly. Beyond her sickly middle aged physique, her other tell was the way in which she introduced herself. She’d led with her doctoral title rather than her service rank, much as he and many at ASTRA did.

“A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Kynes,” Dr. Lockwood offered, and then remembering himself, he looked over at his colleague. “This is Ensign Snnar Vok, my colleague from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity.” Might as well start to circulate the young man’s name in academic circles.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ensign Vok,” Dr. Kynes smiled as she shook his hand. “Very inspiring work you all have done, out there on the frontier.”

“Appreciate it, doctor,” Dr. Lockwood acknowledged. “But what can we do for you this evening?”

“Your talk was truly eye-opening, especially the way you generalized the subspace-like hypersurface to support compaction of its foliations within a higher order manifold,” Dr. Kynes offered. “What I cannot wrap my head around though is how one achieves the excitation necessary to create an Underspace-like compression anthropogenically.”

“Ah yes, that is the great conundrum, is it not?” chuckled Dr. Lockwood. “It’s not unlike the dilemma our forebears faced when confronted with the works of Miguel Alcubierre and José Natário.”

Dr. Kynes and Ensign Vok looked equally lost. Neither had the time, in amongst their research, to study the history of their discipline itself.

“That is to say this is a problem where, as is often the case, the mathematics has outpaced our capacity for engineering,” Dr. Lockwood elaborated. “But that, Dr. Kynes, is where your friends at the ASDB come in. If they’re interested in pursuing this, my lab and I would be more than happy to assist.”

Dr. Kynes was interested. Very interested. But then the dizziness hit, and suddenly she felt hot and clammy. “Umm, yeah… that’d be great… I’ll reach out once I’m back…” Dr. Kynes said, stumbling over her words. “But I’m sorry, if you’ll excuse me.” 

And then she was off, making her way quickly out of the amphitheater.

Dr. Lockwood shrugged. “Was it something I said?” There were other scientists waiting though, men and women who’d come to the front to indulge themselves in his genius, and thus, without another thought, he turned and introduced himself to the next pair, a duo from the Orion Institute of Cosmology.

Dr. Kynes, meanwhile, stumbled as she made her way away from the auditorium and into the corridors of Archanis Station’s upper levels. This was like earlier, but worse now. The dizziness and the hot flashes were coming on with renewed vigor this time. It must have been something she picked up during the trip from Antares shipyards. It was one of the reasons she didn’t particularly like to travel.

Eventually, Dr. Kynes found her way to the turbolift. “Visitor quarters, junction Alpha Six.” As it began to move, she had to lean up against the wall to stabilize herself. God, she was burning up. She raised the back of her hand to her forehead. It was hot to the touch. Ugh, she really needed to lie down.

At long last, the turbolift came to a halt down on the visitor quarters level. Stepping out into the corridor, there were two ladies in evening wear standing there. They looked up at her, and worry fluttered over their faces. This woman they didn’t know looked an absolute mess, barely able to stand. “Ma’am, are you alright?” 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Dr. Kynes said dismissively as she stepped on by. She just needed to get to her bed and lie down, and the pair, late for a double date at a Bajoran bistro on the promenade, carried on without another thought.

Slowly, and stumbling as she went, Dr. Kynes covered the remaining distance to her quarters. The door opened, and she stepped inside. Her head was spinning, and she coughed again. Hard this time. A bunch of phlegm came up, or at least she thought it was phlegm until she looked down. No, that was blood. Why was she coughing up blood? What was happening to her? 

She reached for her combadge, but her hand never made it to her chest.

She collapsed onto the floor.

The lights went out.

The promenade bustled with activity as civilians and officers alike came to dine, to imbibe and to enjoy. How little they knew, thought the old man, sitting alone, as he watched them pass. Soon, fear would take hold. Soon, this place would be deserted. And soon, many would die. It was inevitable. There was nothing they could do to stop it.

Slowly, he lifted his glass, savoring a sip of the fine Aldebaran whisky he’d treated himself to on the eve of the impending apocalypse. As the rich tones and satisfying notes danced across his palette, he glanced out the wide sweeping window to his side. Lingering in the distance lay the massive spaceframe of USS Polaris, sparkling in the starlight. Things wouldn’t be sparkling for long. He wondered how Jake Lewis and Allison Reyes would react, unaware due to his recent travels that neither was aboard, the captain lost to the Underspace and the admiral enroute to Duraxis.

Soft footsteps approached. He heard them, but he didn’t bother to turn. Why would he? He was just a nobody, a drifter enjoying a drink at a nondescript bar on what had, until recently, been a forgotten backwater.

“Fred Kingsley,” came a voice as its speaker cast a long shadow over the table. “Is that really the name you go by these days? Or was it just on our behalf?”

He turned to see a man no younger than him, dressed in civilian attire as unassuming as his own. But the man was no more a civilian than he was. The only difference between them was the master they served. “Kurayami Kioshi,” he nodded in recognition. This snake, the current director of intelligence services for Archanis Station, was not unknown to him. “A proud Starfleet captain these days, I hear?”

“As far as you ever got, Frank,” Captain Kioshi countered as he took a seat across from the old man he knew to be, most certainly, not an individual by the name of Fred Kingsley. “I presume you know it’s a crime to enter a Starfleet facility under a falsified identity?” Not that such forgery even ranked on the long list of crimes Frank Negrescu had committed over his unfortunately long life.

“Oh please,” chuckled Frank Negrescu, unphased by the insinuation. It wasn’t as if the Starfleet captain would actually do anything about it, and even if he did, what did he care about a petty misdemeanor? Things would play out the same regardless of what happened here. “Let’s not pretend you’re so ignorant as to believe that even half of these people are who they say they are.” An outpost on the Federation’s rugged frontier, Archanis Station might look like a shining beacon of the Starfleet’s greatness, but it was pure naivete to assume its clientele came simply to shop on its promenade or barter at its marketplace.

“Why are you here, Frank?” Captain Kioshi asked flatly. He knew exactly who the monster was and what he could do, and he had half a mind to just throw him out an airlock now and save them all the trouble. Rear Admiral Grayson and the others might not like it, but they’d probably thank him later.

“I was just in the area and thought I’d stop by to check out the new digs,” Negrescu replied without batting an eye. “Beats the dump that used to be here, and certainly sends a signal to those in the region.” That signal and what it stood for was also what had made it a target.

“The ship that you arrived on came from Acamar,” Captain Kioshi noted. He’d done his research, and, as he’d confirmed when Negrescu flagged, the inbound freighter made no recorded stops along the way. Negrescu had deliberately traveled weeks to get here. “That’s not in the area.”

“The galaxy is quite large, my friend,” Negrescu smiled, enjoying the back and forth. It had been a long time since he’d sat across the table from someone like Kurayami Kioshi. “Relative to that, even Talvath is in the neighborhood.”

“Cut the bullshit, Frank,” Captain Kioshi interrupted. He was uninterested in the banter, and his expression said as much. “You’re here for a reason.” Someone like Negrescu never did anything without purpose, and he knew that it was likely the only reason they were even having this conversation was because Negrescu had allowed it to happen. “Why?”

“Why so hostile, Kurayami?” Negrescu laughed, ignoring the question.

“Because I don’t like you, and I don’t like how you work,” Captain Kioshi answered as his eyes narrowed on Negrescu. While they were both forged by the same organization in the same era, that’s where their similarities ended. Kurayami Kioshi believed intelligence was a delicate art of quiet observation and manipulation, while Frank Negrescu preferred and revelled in the wet work. “You’re a blunt force object, too loud and too messy, and wherever you go, death follows.”

“Does death follow me or do I follow it?” Negrescu raised his brow.

Captain Kioshi just stared at him.

“Besides, what if I were to tell you that I’m a changed man?” Negrescu flashed a devious smile that fooled no one. “That I softened with old age?”

“I’d tell you that you’re a liar,” Captain Kioshi replied flatly. A man like Frank Negrescu didn’t change.

“Well, unless you’re going to arrest me for petty forgery, I’d like to get back to enjoying my drink,” Negrescu said as he lifted his drink back to his lips, no longer interested in continuing the conversation. “Alone.”

There was nothing more he would accomplish, Captain Kioshi knew. Not now, at least. “I’ll be watching,” he warned, and then he stood and departed. Would he tell Rear Admiral Grayson who was on his station? No, not for now. To do so would be to acknowledge things better left unacknowledged.

“Too bad you haven’t been watching closely enough, old man,” Negrescu muttered once Kioshi was out of earshot. He had no idea what was coming. None of them did.

Hosting two central infirmaries, six community clinics and a smattering of labs and specialized care facilities, the Archanis Station Medical Services Unit saw more than five hundred patients through its doors each day. As its director, Captain Anna Vale was responsible for every aspect of its operation, but while her department played an important role in the lives of the twenty thousand who called it home, on most days, she felt more like an administrator than a physician.

Today was no exception. Spread across Captain Vale’s desk were no less than a dozen PADDs from equipment requisitions to shift schedules to complaint forms, each apparently in need of her urgent review or approval. In amongst them, the only even remotely clinical item was an epidemiological surveillance report related to community spread of mild virological vectors in their drifter population that inhabited the unkempt lower levels of the station. While interesting at an academic level given her background in public health, an outbreak of the Levodian flu was hardly something to write home about.

Just as her stomach began to grumble, reminding her it was well past time for lunch, her combadge chirped. She tapped it, welcoming the momentary interruption. “Doctor Vale here.”

“Ma’am, sorry to disturb you, but I think you need to come down here,” said a voice she recognized as Commander Adak Ormid, her head of community care, a Bolian physician who could do miracles with a subdermal scalpel. “We have a problem. A big problem.”

“What’s going on?” Captain Vale asked, still somewhat distracted by her grumbling stomach and the pile of administrivia on her desk.

“It’d be best if you see for yourself, ma’am,” Commander Ormid replied. She could hear panic in his voice, which was very out of character for the aged physician. With more than forty years of experience, there was little that Commander Ormid hadn’t seen. “We’re at the Promenade Clinic, and be aware, we just activated full biohazard containment protocols.”

“I’m on my way over,” Captain Vale replied as she set down her PADD and hurried out the door. The requisitions and reports could wait. That they’d activated full biohazard containment protocols at one of the community clinics was highly unusual.

The Promenade Clinic, as its name suggested, resided directly off Archanis Station’s main promenade. As opposed to the community clinics that dotted the residential and workplace levels of Canopus class starbase, the Promenade Clinic primarily served visitors who’d flocked to the station to enjoy its shopping, dining and entertainment. While it saw a great diversity of ailments and afflictions, some which prompted more severe responses than the other clinics, never before had it looked as it did as Captain Vale approached today.

A large perimeter had been cordoned off around the clinic, and in that empty space, several modular structures had been erected. By the filters and recyclers visible on the exterior, Captain Vale knew at once what they were: airtight containment units. How had all of this been erected so quickly, and why was she only finding out about it now?

A lieutenant dressed head-to-toe in a hazmat suit emerged from one of the modules. 

“Do I need to suit up?” Captain Vale asked, maintaining her distance.

“No ma’am,” the lieutenant replied. “Triage and screening has been moved out here to maintain clean spaces inside. Patients that test negative are turned away for their own safety, and those who test positive are routed straight to quarantine bays.”

“Test positive for what?” Captain Vale stammered. Certainly not the Levodian flu. What the hell was going on that was so bad that they were turning others away?

“Oh, you don’t know yet, ma’am?”

“Don’t know what?” Captain Vale furled her brow in frustration. If someone didn’t start talking straight soon, she was going to lose her shit.

“It’d be best if you speak with Doctor Ormid,” the lieutenant offered, gesturing for her to proceed into the clinic. “He’s inside going over the latest samples.” As she stepped closer, that’s when she saw it. The look in his eyes. Terror. Pure, unadulterated terror. “It’s not good, ma’am. Not good at all.”

The invisible hand of death was coming for them, and for all of Archanis Station. With a deep sense of dread, she opened the vid link, the only way she dared address them. She’d seen the victims already, and she couldn’t risk it. She might be a dead woman walking, even with all the protective measures in play, and to sit with them could doom them all. At least over the link, she might spare them, at least for now, at least if it hadn’t already spread too far.

“Thank you all for joining on such short notice,” Captain Anna Vale began as she looked at the faces of Rear Admiral Alex Grayson and Captain Elsie Drake of Archanis Station, Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux and Commander James Henderson of the USS Polaris. The first three would be essential if they had any hope of containing it, and the last, the doctor from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, might be their only chance of saving everyone aboard the station. “We have a critical and rapidly developing situation, and time is of the essence.”

Sitting in his office, Rear Admiral Alex Grayson could see the fear on the face of the station’s Director of Medical Services. He’d never seen her like this before. “What’s going on, Anna?” he asked, his tone gentle and collected. As someone who’d seen far too many crises over his many decades of service, he knew the importance of projecting calm when others were the opposite. But what came next, even he wasn’t prepared for.

“At 0930 this morning, a patient arrived at one of our clinics complaining of dizziness, nausea, and fatigue,” Captain Vale began. “The patient rapidly deteriorated. By 1100 hours, they exhibited hemoptysis, epistaxis, and respiratory distress, and by 1230 hours, my staff was forced to induce coma as their body was overtaken by a generalized autoimmune storm. At this point, we didn’t think much of it as, out here on the frontier, we often see complications from xenoviruses and foreign hosts. But then a second patient arrived, and a third, and a fourth, each swiftly succumbing to the same aggressive autoimmune storm we’d seen in the first. By 1400 hours, the clinic on the promenade was swamped, and we began to see cases at our other facilities. And then the first labs came back.”

The captain projected a helical structure on the display, and Commander James Henderson let out an audible gasp. “Anna, are you certain about this?” It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her or what she was saying, just that he couldn’t believe it.

“I’m afraid so,” Captain Vale nodded grimly. “Because of the hyper-accelerated mutation it goes through once it takes hold in a host, and the fact we haven’t seen a case in a quarter century, it took my team some time to trace it back.”

“It can’t be,” Commander Henderson shook his head as his face went ghost white, flashing back to the final days of the Dominion War when, as the fleet raced for a showdown over Cardassia, he found himself fighting another enemy, one more terrifying than even the mighty Jem’Hadar. They never did defeat it then. Hundreds died, and then it just vanished without a trace as the Founders surrendered. “It just can’t be.”

“I’m sorry, but what are we talking about?” Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux asked, channeling what everyone without a medical degree was feeling.

“We are talking about a thing that even nightmares are terrified of,” Commander Henderson replied coldly. “The tiny, creeping death every young medical student hears about, but most believe to be nothing more than a ghost story, much like the boogeyman or Big Foot.” But he knew better. He’d seen it for himself, three decades ago.

“Yeah, still not following…” Captain Devreux grumbled.

Commander Henderson just turned back to his colleague from Archanis Station. “Anna, why your team even considered testing for this vector?” Part of what made the pathogen so effective was how, almost immediately upon taking hold of a host, it mutated to the point of being nearly unrecognizable unless you knew what to look for.

“Honestly, we got lucky,” Captain Vale admitted. “Out of an abundance of caution in light of the Lost Fleet’s return earlier this year, Doctor Ormid, our head of community care, updated our screening protocols to check for obscure vectors last seen during the War.” She hadn’t even known he’d done that until today, but thank god he had. Otherwise, it would have been days before they even knew what was creeping around their station, and by then, it would have been too late. Far too late.

“Doctors, please!” Rear Admiral Grayson interjected frustratedly. “From what you are saying – or rather, not saying – I gather we have a problem, but for the life of me, I still have no idea what that problem actually is or what we need to do about it.”

“We need to lock down the station immediately,” Captain Vale replied without another thought, not even an ounce of hesitation in her voice over such a bold declaration. “Full airborne vector quarantine protocols, no ships in, no ships out, all non-essential personnel sequestered to their quarters, and the use of distancing and clustering for all essential personnel.”

That was a huge step, an ask seldom made by a medical officer, and the assuredness with which she stated it sucked all the air out of the room. Was she serious? 

“Anna, what exactly are we talking about here?” Captain Drake finally asked warily.

“We’re talking about a bioweapon with no known cure, one that spreads like wildfire, through aerosols and fluids, and will render everyone it infects dead within a week,” Captain Vale replied darkly. “Even in the last hour, the number of cases have quadrupled, but soon, it won’t be our medical facilities that are overflowing. It’ll be our morgues.”

“Are you… are you certain?” Rear Admiral Grayson asked, stuttering for the first time any on the call could ever remember. He’d fought the Dominion and born witness to the tragedy of Mars firsthand, but this… this was new, even for him.

“I’m afraid she’s dead right,” Commander Henderson nodded, realizing his unfortunate choice of words only after he said them. “This virological vector was engineered by Dominion in what we always presumed was a last ditch attempt to defeat the Alpha Quadrant – except we beat them to it with a bioweapon of our own.” The fact Starfleet Intelligence had unleashed a morphogenic plague upon the Founders was one of the worst kept secrets in all of Starfleet, and in the doctor’s mind, it was also one of the most reprehensible.

“Doctor, how long does it take before it presents itself?” Captain Drake asked. 

“In all recorded cases, the symptoms start to show within seventy two hours, and that’s when it becomes detectable too,” Commander Henderson replied. “It is contagious shortly before that point, spreading through aerosols and other bodily fluids before the host knows something is wrong.” Simply being in close proximity was enough to doom you to death. “Its virulence is the only advantage we have, in that it works so fast that it will kill itself off if it can’t find a place to spread before it kills off all its hosts.” It was a sick way to look at it, but if they implemented a complete quarantine, and everyone eventually succumbed to the virus, it would die with them. Presumably, that was what happened during the War, and with the War then coming to an end, it was never reintroduced into another population to continue its work.

“Where could this have come from?” Captain Drake asked, her analytical mind already thinking through the security implications. “There are very few systems and starbases within three days’ journey, and if it’s as virulent as you say it is, it wouldn’t exactly travel much longer without someone becoming aware. Is it possible it was introduced here?”

“Possible?” Commander Henderson asked. “I would say probable.”

“I’ll get security digging into it right away,” Captain Drake offered.

“While he’s at it, I’m going to need his team’s assistance with contact tracing too,” Captain Vale interjected. “Typically, my staff would do it, but we’re going to be fully sequestered, both due to our risk of exposure and also the fact that, until this is over, we’re going to need every trained medical professional bedside, so I’m going to need some extra hands.”

“I’ll let Commander Eriksson know on both fronts,” Captain Drake confirmed, referencing the chief of station security. “And I’ll likely tie in Captain Kioshi’s guys too.” The intelligence chief might not like it, but it’d be far more useful than whatever it was he usually did.

“We also need to intercede as it relates to any ship that’s left the station in the last seventy two hours,” Commander Henderson jumped back in. “We can’t allow this to escape into broader society.” If it did, there was no telling how far it would go, and how many lives would be lost.

“I’ll handle that,” Rear Admiral Grayson offered. “We’ll recall them to a holding pattern outside the station, and I’ll have the Lincoln interdict any vessel that fails to comply.” Beyond stopping the spread, it would also ensure that, if the person who introduced it was trying to flee, they wouldn’t get away. “We’ll also need to notify Starfleet Medical and Fourth Fleet Operations.”

“Already done,” Commander Henderson reported, drawing surprised looks from the assembled command staff. “The moment I saw that helix, it was one simple message back to Command, and now all the balls are in motion.” Still, the others looked confused. Doctors did not usually just start calling admirals. “I don’t think you all are getting it. Why would I wait? There’s only one play, and there’s no time to delay.”

“Should we recall the Diligent as well?” Captain Drake asked. Fleet Admiral Reyes would just be arriving at Duraxis about now, but as the Director of the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, it was possible she could be helpful.

“There’s nothing Allison can do to help,” Commander Henderson shook his head. “Except end up infected.” Better she stay at a distance for now, he figured. Someone would need to clean up the mess if none of them made it out the other side.

“I concur,” nodded Fleet Captain Devreux. As nice as it would have been to relinquish the big chair to her for this crisis, he knew she had a situation of her own to address, one that could be of galactic importance. He even debated whether he’d even notify her now, or if he’d keep her in the dark a little longer, just to ensure she didn’t flip back around.

“Well then, I suppose there’s only one thing left to do,” Rear Admiral Grayson said as he turned to address the group as a whole. He straightened his jacket, took a deep breath, and then made the call, the call that was only his to make: “As of this moment, I am ordering a full and complete quarantine of Archanis Station, and under the security directives of the United Federation of Planets, I am ordering the recall – and interdiction, if necessary – of any starship that has visited the station within the last seventy two hours. Captain Drake, make it so with all due haste.”

“It will be done,” Captain Drake nodded dutifully. “And if there’s nothing else, I’d like to drop to make it so.” It would take some time to effectuate the total and complete lockdown of their city in space.

“There are few matters I’d still like to discuss with the others,” Rear Admiral Grayson replied. “But none more important than the task before you. You’re good to drop.”

Captain Drake nodded and cut her link.

Rear Admiral Grayson then turned to the others on the display. “Captain Devreux, Doctor Henderson, what are you going to do about Polaris?”

“Members of our crew have visited the station so we’re undisputedly part of the quarantine,” Commander Henderson replied without waiting for Captain Devreux. “As far as any indications of infection, nothing so far though. I do recommend though that we institute a shelter-in-place for all non-essential activities to minimize the risk of spread if it has come aboard, and additionally, any crew currently visiting Archanis Station must remain there and not return to Polaris.”

“Agreed on all points,” Fleet Captain Devreux nodded, recognizing that, if it was as bad as the doctors were making it out to be, they might soon be sitting at a distance of several thousand kilometers, watching as every last living soul on the station, including some of his crew, wilted away and died. “Consider it done.”

“Doctor Henderson, I have a favor to ask,” Captain Vale then asked meekly.

“Anything, Anna,” Commander Henderson offered in a heartfelt tone. He knew what was coming, and he felt for her with all his heart. Soon, the bodies would begin to pile up, and then her staff would begin to succumb too. It would be only a matter of time. “Do you want me to send some of my staff over?” He knew, in his offer, he might be signing the death warrants of his own people, but they were healers. It was their duty, and his too. He would join them as well.

“That’s a kind offer, James, but absolutely not,” Captain Vale shook her head firmly. She was just as aware of what was coming as he was. “You and your teams, still healthy and not inundated with the sick and the dying, you are our best hope. Please… please… please do everything you can to find a cure before… before it comes for us all.”

“If it is in our power, we will,” Commander Henderson assured her, the promise of one healer to another. “You just worry about your people, and staying alive. We will coordinate with Starfleet Medical, the private labs, even foreign powers if they’re willing, anyone and everyone, and we’ll let you know the moment we have a thing. This is now our only priority.”

“Archanis Station to all vessels. Please be advised that all flight operations are suspended until further notice. Further, Starfleet and civilian vessels currently berthed or having visited within the last seventy two hours are duly ordered to hold position and await further instruction. Finally, any vessel inbound for the station, you are advised to make other plans. That is all.”

Commander Ari Skye cut the link and exhaled deeply. In the six months she’d served as the Chief of Flight Operations for Archanis Station, never before had an hour passed without an arrival or a departure. Now, by order of Rear Admiral Alex Grayson, they were closed until further notice, until either the virus was stopped, or it ran its course. How long would it be? And how bad would it get? Truthfully, she had no idea, but she wondered if she’d even be standing here to reopen the station at the end of it all. Would any of them?

“Relax, Ari. You did good,” offered Commander Jazzir, the always positive Risian who served as the station’s Chief of Civilian Services. Seeing the look on her face, he wanted to walk over, to give her a reassuring hug, but he couldn’t. Five meters was the new protocol of minimum distance as defined by Captain Anna Vale, their Director of Health Services. “You’re on comms all day long, telling captains to do this and that. What makes this any different?”

“I guess it’s just the finality of the whole thing,” Commander Skye admitted, her face downfallen. “This isn’t about telling someone where to park their Flyut.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Commander Jazzir nodded. “We’re gonna have to cancel the holiday party, and no more dancing at Nebula Nights for a while.” The Risian was well-known for getting footloose any and every opportunity he got, and Nebula Nights, a jazz bar with live music seven nights a week, was one of his regular haunts.

“How is it you’re worried about that at a time like this?!” Commander Skye asked incredulously. It wasn’t just his outward demeanor that confused her either. It was what she could feel emanating from him, a calm and a warmth sharply contrasting with the dark, fearful emotions rippling off everyone else. Somehow, he genuinely seemed alright with it all. But how?

“A wise man, a musician of your homeworld, once said: ‘If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment’,” Commander Jazzir offered with a smile.

“But only if your heart still beats,” Commander Skye countered depressingly. “If Captain Vale is right, there’s a chance none of ours are beating at the end of this.” The rundown they’d received from the medical director described a virological vector of incredible virulence, one that, once it took hold, all but guaranteed an autoimmune storm that only ended with your death. Basically, if you caught the thing that was creeping around the station, you were dead. That made her want to crawl into a hole and hide until it was all over, but alas, she had a job to do. They all did.

“We’re doing everything we can, Ari,” Commander Jazzir reminded her. “What comes will come, but I don’t intend to spend my last days, if these be them, drowning in depression and fear. It’s also possible the doctor could be wrong, or the wizbangs on the Polaris come through for us.”

That sounded like grasping for strings, Commander Skye thought to herself, but before she could respond, Captain Elsie Drake stepped onto the command deck. Her face was neither jovial like the Risian, nor fearful like the rest. Instead, the station’s commander just wore a look of cold professionalism. Was she scared? Absolutely. But she was holding it together by staying focused on the work they had to do. “How are we looking?”

“The suspension in flight operations has been announced,” Commander Skye reported.

“Hotels report ready to sequester un-homed individuals,” Commander Jazzir reported in reference to everyone from the homeless drifters who lived on the lower decks to the crewmen of the USS Polaris that’d come aboard but now couldn’t go back to their ship. “The closure notice is also ready to go out to all civilian establishments. I’ll send it as soon as your declaration goes out.” That notice would close every shop, every eatery, and every entertainment establishment until the end of the crisis.

Yes, that declaration. That announcement. A closure and quarantine. A pit of dread began to develop in her stomach. But first, there was one more update she needed. She glanced over at another officer, a commander in red sitting silently far from the others, his head down and his eyes focused. “Owens, how about you? Where are you with the duty assignments?”

“I’m working on it!” Commander Mike Owens snapped a bit more aggressively than he meant. “Just give me a bit more time! It’s a tall task!” He was busy carving the staff into little work pods meant to limit community spread, but if he messed up and two pods collided, an outbreak in one could become an outbreak in all. “I mean how the hell do you split up five thousand officers, all critical to the smooth functioning of our station, and ensure none cross paths?”

His response was highly uncharacteristic, the captain recognized. Commander Owens, their Chief of Station Operations, was known for telling them all to ‘keep it playful’, and if he was a ball of stress and nerves already, it didn’t bode well for the morale of the crew more generally, especially if things started to actually get bad. “Take your time, Mike. I’ll make the station-wide announcement, and then why don’t I help you sort out the duty rosters?”

“No, I’m quite alright,” Commander Owens shook his head. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way captain, but who’s to say that you or I aren’t already infected? Didn’t the doctor say you’re contagious before the symptoms show? And is five meters really enough? Are you sure any of us should even be in the same room?” He glanced around the command center nervously. It was just the four of them in the voluminous space, the emptiest it’d ever been, but still it felt too crowded. And if one of them was already infected, half the command staff could be dead by week’s end.

“Captain Vale and Commander Henderson were in full agreement on the protocols,” Captain Drake assured him. Five meters was believed, with a fairly high degree of confidence, to be enough distance to avoid transmission of not-yet-symptomatic carriers due to the distance-decay effect of respiratory aerosols. “If we cannot trust the science, what can we trust?”

“I guess you’re right,” Commander Owens sighed. “It’s just… it’s just this is a different sort of enemy. Raiders, no biggie. Criminal underground, we got ’em. Even an angry Klingon warlord, we know how that ends. But this? We can neither blow it up, nor talk it down.” It was just a faceless, invisible, creeping killer, stalking through the station, hunting them all.

“We will manage, as we always do,” Captain Drake reassured him, but if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t so certain they’d actually be okay. If its spread continued to accelerate, the staff would eventually start to drop like flies. And what would the civilians do? At first, they might listen, but when Commander Eriksson had no security officers to maintain order, and Captain Vale had no doctors to care for them, what then? How far would they go? “Commander Skye, in order to ensure the lockdown holds,” she added for good measure. “Why don’t we also go ahead and start rendering inert the propulsion systems of all docked small craft?”

The Betazoid flight controller furled her brow. “You afraid someone’s gonna take one for a spin?” But as she said it, it became real. If things got bad and the bodies started to pile up, the lockdown wouldn’t hold. Eventually, people would get desperate, looking for an escape, anything to get away from the haunted halls of an infected crypt. That meant they’d go for the shuttles, the runabouts, anything that could get them out of here, and if they succeeded, rather than fleeing the virus, they’d just be seeding it across the sector – or beyond.

“Just thinking ahead,” Captain Drake replied, trying to downplay the implications, although no one was naive enough to miss her intimation. “And Jazzir, why don’t you put some thought into how, as fear begins to mount, we can manage public relations and keep the peace?” They’d have to do something besides deploy security forces, both because security actions would just put more people together, accelerating the spread, and also because eventually Commander Eriksson might not have the men to even staff the line.

“How about we just play the deep baritones of some sixteenth century Klingon opera for all to hear?” the Risian suggested lightly, prompting a grin even from Commander Owens. “That should soothe them, right?”

“If I gotta hear the howls of Barak-Kadan on repeat,” Commander Owens laughed. “I’ll be first in line for the airlock. Dying of vacuum beats dying alone in my room with that rancor as the soundtrack of my demise.”

Everyone chuckled, and that made Captain Drake breathe a little easier. 

They were going to be alright. 

Jazzir, Skye, Owens and the others, they’d manage, and aboard the Polaris and across the galaxy, some of the greatest science minds of their generation were already working on how to beat this thing. But now it was time to address the station. 

“Computer,” she said as she tapped her combadge. “Prepare for shipwide address.”

As the computer chirped in acknowledgement, all around the command center, everyone grew silent. What would the captain say? How would she share with the station the grimmest of news, while ensuring calm and compliance?

“Attention, all hands. This is the captain,” Captain Drake began, her voice steady, although inwardly she felt much the opposite. “I come to you with an important announcement. Earlier today, station health services reported several cases of a highly infectious contagion present on the station. In response to the threat this contagion poses to public health, the command staff has made the difficult decision to issue an immediate shelter-in-place order for all residents, staff and visitors currently aboard Archanis Station, and to stand down inbound and outbound flight operations. You are ordered to return to your quarters at once, and to remain there until further notice except under emergency circumstances.”

She paused, letting the words sink in for the twenty thousand who heard them as they echoed across the station. This was a big ask, but she needed them to abide by it. The consequences, if they did not, would be enormous, and she hoped it would not come to enforcement in order to ensure the lockdown orders stood.

“This would not be the first time that we have issued a shelter-in-place order,” Captain Drake then continued, choosing transparency in her tact so as to prepare them for what lay ahead. “But this time, it will be different. This time, it will not be for a brief period while we resolve a tactical situation.” There’d been that scuffle with raiders, and that time with the rogue Klingon warlord, but both of those had lasted mere hours. “No, I won’t sugarcoat it for you. This time, it’s going to be days, if not weeks, before we can be together again. I understand the burden this places on you and your families, from get-togethers you will miss to trips you planned on taking, but please understand that this is for your own safety. This contagion spreads through the aerosols in your respiration and the fluids in your body, and social distancing is the number one way to slow its spread and buy time for our health services to care for those already sick.”

She left out the bit about the disease being one hundred percent fatal. Those statistics would be disseminated by Captain Vale in her first medical update to the public, but for now, they might be too much. They might create panic when, right now, she just needed to get everyone back to the safety of their quarters.

“Even as we work to contain the virus, know that we have measures in place to ensure that the station continues to operate at full efficiency,” Captain Drake assured them. “Further, in the event you should need anything, our standard hotlines for our operations and services teams remain fully staffed, and we are ready and able to assist.”

For now, at least. There might come a time, some time in the near future, when they wouldn’t be. But hopefully it didn’t come to that.

“Finally, be aware that I have authorized the Director of Station Security to enforce this order, but please, don’t make that necessary,” Captain Drake begged as she drew the address to a close. “Please, for your safety, and for the safety of your neighbors and every individual on this station, heed this order and return to your quarters. More details will be shared in the coming hours from the health services division. Archanis Command out.”

She tapped her combadge, ending the address.

“It’s done,” Captain Drake exhaled. “Now we’ll just have to see if people listen.”

“They will, Elsie. They will,” Commander Jazzir assured her. “Our people, they are strong. All we need to do is remind them that they can be part of the solution, and they will rally together – apart, of course – to make it so.”

Captain Drake wasn’t so sure, but she hoped they would. She hoped too that this would buy enough time, that it hadn’t already spread too far, and that the USS Polaris would come through for them. Otherwise, they might not come out the other side.

“What sort of a monster concocts such a thing?” Lieutenant Commander Karl Verhoeven asked incredulously as he stared at the lab results from Archanis Station. Death was the only guarantee. Death, and the spread to others before its host succumbed.

“We were no better. Maybe worse, in fact,” Commander James Henderson frowned as a shadow washed across his face, thinking back to the choices that’d been made during the war. “The Dominion bioengineered this virus to eradicate worlds, but what we built was meant to eradicate an entire species. It was an attempt at genocide, plain and simple.”

“You almost say it as though you sympathize with them.”

“That, I do not,” Commander Henderson assured his colleague. He’d stood by the bedside of far too many as they breathed their last breath during that wretched war. “I just don’t see us as all that much better.” The desperation that had driven Starfleet to unleash the morphogenic virus upon the Founders was not all that unlike that which drove the Dominion to its own evil ends. “Do you know the history of the changelings?”

The microbiologist shook his head. He did not.

“As the legend goes, before they became the Founders of the Dominion, they were victims themselves, hunted by solids that didn’t understand them,” Commander Henderson shared. “When you recognize their journey, it offers a perspective to their behavior.”

“But it doesn’t excuse it,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven insisted. “A childhood of abuse cannot be used to justify your later transgressions.”

“I do not disagree in the slightest,” Commander Henderson concurred. “But it’s something we would be well served to remember too when it comes to our own choices.” Their hands were no cleaner than the Dominion’s when it came to this sort of stuff.

“I never thought of it that way…”

“No, most people don’t.”

There was more to the story than the aged doctor was letting on, Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven could sense. “Were you involved in our work? What we unleashed on them?”

“As a specialist in interspecies medicine, I was obviously of interest,” Commander Henderson shared. “They came to me, dark men, nameless men, men who don’t exist, and they offered me an opportunity to strike back at the Dominion, to end the war, not just for now, but forever.”

“What did you do?”

“I am a healer, Karl. I took an oath to save life – not just human life, but all life,” Commander Henderson replied. “I told them, in no uncertain terms, that my work would not be used for genocide. I was in the minority though. Others in our line of work, in their desperation, said yes. They took what they knew of how to save a life, and they used it to try and end a civilization.”

“But it stopped the war, didn’t it?”

“We are healers, my friend. That oath we take, it doesn’t go away whenever it’s convenient. Those who conspired with the darker sides of Starfleet, they committed the greatest sin of our profession,” Commander Henderson replied disdainfully as he looked over at the virological telemetry on their monitors. “You ask what sort of monsters could concoct something like this, and the answer, I’m afraid, is no further away than a mirror.”

“The virus forced their surrender, and the Founders live on,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven observed. “There was no genocide, in the end.”

“Those who released it, many would have been happy to just let it run its course,” Commander Henderson assured him. “I suspect that if they got the opportunity to do it again, they probably would.” He wondered about even some of their own, the ones in Polaris Squadron and across the Fourth Fleet. He’d seen the fire in their eyes when the Lost Fleet descended upon Deneb, the lines people like Captain Lewis and Admiral Reyes were willing to cross to defeat them.

“Do you think they had a hand in this?” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven asked, returning to the actual topic at hand. After three decades, had they once more unleashed this virus on the Alpha Quadrant? After the return of the Lost Fleet, and after the machinations of Frontier Day, anything was possible.

“Do I think the Dominion unleashed it on Archanis Station, here and now? No, almost certainly not,” Commander Henderson shook his head. “In the end, they came to our aid in Deneb, and while changelings participated in Frontier Day, all indications suggest those changelings were operating beyond the Great Link.”

“They say the Dominion thinks in terms of centuries and millennia, that they play the long game,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven cautioned. “We had them cornered in the seventies, but is it possible they surrendered then simply to buy themselves time to regroup and move again?”

“That is certainly possible,” Commander Henderson agreed. “But if they were playing the long game, they wouldn’t start here with this. The Archanis Sector is too irrelevant and too far removed for a virus unleashed here to spread to consequential portions of the galaxy. This virus is a tool of terror, a weapon meant to extinguish all life on a station, a world or across a small region of space, but it’s not the sort of thing that ends all of civilization.”

“Then why’d they even make it?”

“Instead of committing a fleet to capture a world, you just send one changeling armed with this stuff,” Commander Henderson suggested, recalling the devastation he’d seen first hand when they responded to exactly such a place. “In the aftermath too, you don’t have to rebuild. It kills all the people, but it leaves all the infrastructure.”

“Why not design it with a longer incubation period, to give it more time to spread before it kills its host?” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven asked. If he put himself in their place, that’s what he would have done.

“Our theory was that this was all they could devise at the time,” Commander Henderson explained. “A consequence of our diversity, the Federation is not as easy to target for them as they were for us. We only had to target one species. They had to target hundreds.”

“So our diversity saved us?”

“Either that, or they simply weren’t as evil as we were.”

“Well, that’s a terrifying thought,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven shivered. It was crazy to think that the Federation had concocted something as sinister as what they were now staring at. “But if you don’t think the Dominion was involved, then how did this thing end up here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” shrugged Commander Henderson, not because he didn’t have any ideas, but rather because he had far too many. Could it be a rogue Changeling that’d eluded them after Frontier Day? Possibly. How about a criminal organization that’d come into possession of it as a result of all the burned out hulls that littered the Deneb Sector? Equally possible. Or could it even have been stolen from one of their labs? Wouldn’t be the first time. “Frankly, though, that’s someone else’s problem to sort out. Right now, we’ve got a more pressing one. We need to figure out how to stop this thing. What’ve you got so far?”

“To be honest, I can’t make heads or tails of it because all the samples we’ve been sent are so dramatically divergent,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven admitted. “The only thing consistent is the autoimmune presentations that all variations trigger. The receptors, the enzymes, and the capsids from each sample are too varied to design something that’d target them all.”

Commander Henderson was unsurprised. “Its rate of mutation is what eluded us during the war too. We could never figure out how to fight it because, by the time you design a payload for one person, it won’t work for the next.” And sadly, the person it was designed for was always dead before they could manufacture it.

“Then we just need to catch it at the source.”

Commander Henderson nodded.

“But we can’t detect it before they are symptomatic.”

“And therein lies the problem,” Commander Henderson sighed. “We can’t find the damn thing when it’s at such trace quantities in their system, and by the time it takes hold, it’s too divergent from the primordial strain to be useful for a generalized antiviral payload.”

Admiral’s Log. Stardate 78927.

So far, the lockdown is holding. Commander Eriksson has reported only a few instances of non-compliance aboard the station, and Captain Cassidy has only had to run down one ship breaking quarantine.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends. 

Aboard the station, cases are rising at an unbelievable rate, more than one hundred as of the last report, and we had our first fatality last night, followed by two more this morning. Captain Vale tells me this is to be expected, that we will continue to see infections from before the lockdown for the next few days, and that death is all but assured for most, if not all, who come into contact with the virus.

I’m not ready to accept what they’re saying about mortality yet though. If they’re right, the one hundred and ten infections we have now means that I will be reporting one hundred and ten deaths in a future log entry. A one hundred percent fatality rate. 

I would ask how that’s even possible, were it not the Dominion we’re talking about. I remember the rotating door of pilots during the war, one hundred percent turnover, not to reassignment, but to death, in the first four months alone. I remember watching the Icarus burn, all hands lost, only two of us pilots returning from Operation Return. And I remember our final push, when it was the Icarus over and over, ship after ship, tens of thousands crying out as they breathed their last breaths over Cardassia. 

When we speak of the Dominion and their creations, why should I be the least bit surprised? 

There is only one guarantee when it comes to them, and that is death. 

They have no respect for life.

Zero.

Still, what is curious is that this contagion appears to have originated here. Why?

While the people of the Archanis Sector deserve our attention and our support, and I’m proud to command this effort, I’m not so naive as to believe this place is consequential enough to be the first front of a new war with the Dominion. Is it a test? Maybe. But more likely, especially in light of recent reports from Admiral Beckett’s office, I’m inclined to suspect this is the result of the illicit proliferation of weapons from the past.

I have asked Commander Eriksson to look into the matter, to review past arrivals and departures, to see if we can figure out where this…

The door chimed, cutting him off mid-sentence.

Why was there a chime at his door? The station was on lockdown, and in-person interactions were to be limited to essential activities only. While he was the Sector Commander, he was hardly essential for anything that couldn’t be done over a video link.

The door chimed again.

“Come.”

An aged man, twenty years even the rear admiral’s senior, stepped through the threshold.

“I must say I’m surprised to see you up here, Kurayami,” Rear Admiral Grayson offered. To say it was uncommon to receive an unprompted visit from Captain Kurayami Kioshi would be an understatement. Save for mandatory meetings where he would sit in the back and say very little, the station’s aloof head of intelligence services kept to himself to such a degree that most forgot he was even a member of Archanis Station’s senior staff. “What can I do for you?”

“You asked Eriksson and I to look into the origins of the contagion.”

“Yes, I did,” nodded Rear Admiral Grayson. “It didn’t come from thin air, and it’s my hope that we can stop whomever introduced it before they take it elsewhere.” That they’d put the quarantine up so fast and held every ship to egress their station within the incubation period meant whomever was responsible was still within their reach.

“I may have a lead.”

“You could have just called,” Rear Admiral Grayson pointed out. It hardly seemed the sort of thing that required an in-person interaction when they were trying to limit the spread of the contagion. If his senior staff wasn’t obeying the rules on the first day, what’d that say for the rest? They needed to set a good example.

“No, I couldn’t have,” Captain Kioshi said in an insidious tone. “It’s not the sort of thing you put over the link.”

“Oh, I see,” Rear Admiral Grayson frowned. He wasn’t sure about that. What could the captain have that he couldn’t trust to an encrypted comms channel? Still, he’d entertain it: “I guess since you’re here, the damage is already done if one of us is infected, so what’ve you got for me?”

“A hunch,” Captain Kioshi replied as he approached the wall-mounted terminal opposite the admiral’s desk. He withdrew a bioneural memory stick from his coat and plugged it into the device bus. At first, nothing visible happened, but in the background, the stick was hard at work sandboxing itself, disabling all system logging, and disconnecting the terminal from the network. Once it was done, a man appeared on the screen, old and balding with a darkness in his eyes.

“Who is he?” Rear Admiral Grayson asked. He didn’t recognize the man.

“Before we go further, let me be very clear with you,” Captain Kioshi instructed, his tone firm as if he was the superior officer in the room. “Nothing we discuss here leaves this room. Not in your personal log. Not over a comlink. Not to Drake or Eriksson, nor to Ramar, Dahlgren or Beckett.”

“What’s the classification level?” Rear Admiral Grayson asked suspiciously. The idea that anything he’d be privy to could not be shared with Admiral Beckett, the head of Fourth Fleet Intelligence, was preposterous.

“It doesn’t have one,” Captain Kioshi replied flatly. “It’s beyond classification.”

Rear Admiral Grayson stared at the aged captain. “That’s not how this works, Kurayami,” he replied sternly, unwilling to yield so easily. “I understand the importance of sensitive information, but I’m not going to play your game of shadows.” He was not a fan of off-book stuff, and he would not entertain cloak and dagger stuff except where required by orders or protocol. “The discretion over whom I chose to enlist, if this information warrants it, is mine and mine alone, but I will be thoughtful about it.”

The captain stood there, arms folded across his chest. That was not an acceptable answer.

“Don’t make me give you an order, captain,” Rear Admiral Grayson continued, his tone firm and unwavering. “If there’s important information you’re sitting on, you need to spill it. Now.” Lives depended on it. Very possibly every single life on the station.

“Very well,” Captain Kioshi relented, not because of Rear Admiral Grayson’s demand, but because he knew how critical the information was. “Just be aware that, if this stuff gets out, it will do real damage, and it won’t be me you’re answering to.”

Who the hell would he be answering to then? Rear Admiral Grayson didn’t even understand what that meant. “Go on…”

“Just give me your assurance, still, that nothing goes over the link or is recorded in digital systems,” Captain Kioshi requested. “Assume they are all compromised.” He knew the lengths to which this man could go, and the tools he had at his disposal.

“That I can agree to,” Rear Admiral Grayson nodded warily, not because he liked it, or really bought such a premise, but simply because he was unwilling to debate further. “So who is this guy?”

“His name is Frank Negrescu,” Captain Kioshi stated. “A former intelligence operator.”

“One of ours?”

“On paper.”

A strange response, but one that told him what he needed to know. “I gather he wasn’t reviewing SIGINT from a cubicle in San Francisco, was he?” Rear Admiral Grayson inferred.

“Not unless he was there to kill an analyst.”

“We don’t do that,” Rear Admiral Grayson insisted. “You’re joking, right?” Starfleet wasn’t in the business of commissioning murders against anyone, and especially not its own.

The captain, though, looked dead serious.

 “There are laws against that.”

Still, the captain didn’t blink.

“Wait… you’re actually being serious, aren’t you?”

“Dead serious,” Captain Kioshi nodded. “From Earth to Romulus, Frank Negrescu was a wet work guy, ruthless and highly effective. He would go anywhere and do anything to root out any enemy, foreign or domestic.” He knew more than most about the man, but even he had only a small part of the story – enough, though, to know how dangerous Frank Negrescu was.

“What happened to him?”

“Well, age catches up to us all, doesn’t it?” Captain Kioshi chuckled, looking down at himself and then over at Grayson. Neither of them were particularly young and chipper. “Eventually, some idiot thought it a good idea to pin a fourth pip on his collar and send him to HQ to advise on matters of intelligence. Let’s just say it didn’t work out well. His worldview and his way of being was too divergent from civil society, and in 2389, he was discharged from the fleet on less-than-agreeable terms.” He neglected to mention the dead bodies, bureaucrats Negrescu had labeled as traitors and that, while they’d never been able to definitively trace back to him, they were all but certain had died by his hand. “Since then, besides a rumor here or a body there, no one knew what became of him… until now.”

“Until now?”

“Five days ago, Frank Negrescu arrived on Archanis Station aboard a freighter out of Acamar, using forged papers and a fictitious name,” Captain Kioshi explained. “And then yesterday, a deadly contagion with a three day incubation period appeared out of nowhere.”

“The station sees thousands of visitors weekly,” Rear Admiral Grayson reminded his colleague. “If we got suspicious of every wayward soul with a shady past, our brig would be overflowing. What makes you think this Negrescu guy is involved?”

“Wherever Frank Negrescu goes, death is sure to follow,” Captain Kioshi cautioned darkly. “He doesn’t go anywhere or do anything without purpose. If he’s here, he’s here for a reason. It’d be quite a coincidence if, shortly after his arrival, people started dying and he wasn’t involved.”

“But he was a captain in Starfleet,” Rear Admiral Grayson pointed out. This was someone who’d taken the same oath as he had, and someone who’d clearly had a long and successful enough career to earn four pips.

“Captains go bad,” Captain Kioshi reminded his colleague. “And in Negrescu’s case, I’d say he was probably never good. Just convenient for those who needed him – up until he wasn’t, until he became too much of a liability even for them.” They shouldn’t have just discharged him from the fleet though. They should have terminated him. Instead, they’d left him a free agent.

“Why didn’t you bring this to my attention earlier?” Rear Admiral Grayson asked. “You said he’s been here for four days.” If this man was as dangerous as the captain was implying, he could have used the heads up earlier.

“As you said, the station sees thousands of visitors weekly,” Captain Kioshi parroted back the admiral’s words to him, neglecting to mention that he had in fact already confronted Negrescu on the promenade. “Until something went wrong, what was I to say? There’s a bad guy hanging out on the promenade? But when you asked Eriksson and I to look into how the virus got onto the station, let’s just say Negrescu’s right at the top of the list.”

“Alright,” Rear Admiral Grayson nodded. Captain Kioshi was probably right on that point. “So where is Mister Negrescu now?” 

“Unfortunately, that’s where we’ve got a bit of a problem,” Captain Kioshi frowned. “I put my best team on tailing him, but he lost them like they were a gaggle of freshman cadets.”

“Well, let’s find him. This place is locked up tight, and with all the systems we’ve got, it can’t be that hard, can it?”

“Frank Negrescu is a ghost,” Captain Kioshi cautioned. “We’re doing everything we can, but understand that this is someone we trained, and someone who would have died long ago if he wasn’t so good at evading capture from enemies far more conniving than us. If he doesn’t want to be found, we may never find him.”

“In the past twenty four hours, case counts have risen to one hundred and fourteen.”

One hundred and fourteen. A start, but not nearly enough. Not yet. The contagion had only just begun to spread. And spread it would, just as it was designed.

“Our staff are working tirelessly to render critical care to those in need.”

They might slow it, but they couldn’t stop it. In the end, the prognosis was fatal. It was all but guaranteed.

“The most effective measure remains social distancing, and we beg of you to continue to observe the stay-at-home orders to slow the spread.”

He could hear the exhaustion in the voice of the station’s medical director, Captain Anna Vale. That wasn’t a good sign for her. Not when this was only the beginning.

It was going to get worse. So much worse.

The station’s staff had only instituted the lockdown eighteen hours ago, and the virus had a three day incubation period. That meant there were two more days worth of cases that would flood the infirmary before their measures even began to have an effect.

And that meant two more days before his next move.

As the public health announcement drew to a close, he glanced at the monitors spread across his makeshift desk, each displaying a surveillance feed from a key area on the station. He could see the promenade, all but empty now, and the hallway outside his hotel room, just in case anyone came for him. So too could he see the command center, a lone commander standing watch, and the primary infirmary, bustling with activity as the medical staff fought the inevitable. But it was a different screen that drew his attention, one watching the corridor lined with the offices of the command staff.

“So predictable,” he muttered under his breath as he stared at Captain Kurayami Kioshi, the station’s aged intelligence chief, who walked down the otherwise empty corridor, drawing to a stop in front of the rear admiral’s office. “Finally getting around to telling Grayson, I guess.”

There wasn’t anything he could say that would change any of this. Still, he was curious. The intelligence chief might’ve thought an in-person visit would prevent eavesdropping, but so reliant and trusting was Starfleet of its systems that he didn’t even have to bug the room. Instead, he just used the tunnel he’d already established into the comms network to issue a ping with a malformed payload to Rear Admiral Grayson’s combadge. That payload broke through with a buffer overflow, allowing him to commandeer its internal controls. He activated the internal mic without an audible chime, and then he relayed the pickup back to his hideout.

“Five days ago, Frank Negrescu arrived on Archanis Station aboard a freighter out of Acamar, using forged papers and a fictitious name. And then yesterday, a deadly contagion with a three day incubation period appeared out of nowhere.”

Good. They’d begun to piece it together. Sort of, at least. This had been why he’d allowed Captain Kioshi to identify him here in the first place. That they already knew who he was would make it easier when at last he revealed himself to them.

“He doesn’t go anywhere or do anything without purpose. If he’s here, he’s here for a reason. It’d be quite a coincidence if, shortly after his arrival, people started dying and he wasn’t involved.”

That was also correct. Mostly. He wasn’t the sightseeing variety.

“I put my best team on tailing him, but he lost them like they were a gaggle of freshman cadets.”

That was Captain Kioshi’s best team? What an embarrassing admission. A gaggle of freshman cadets might have done a better job. Intelligence, as a discipline, had lost its edge, its officers too reliant on their tech and their toys. But that tech and those toys were easy to defeat, and then they had nothing.

“Negrescu is a ghost. We’re doing everything we can, but understand that this is someone we trained, and someone who would already be dead if he wasn’t so good at evading capture from people far more conniving than us. If he doesn’t want to be found, we may never find him.”

Yes, if he wasn’t good at what he did, he would have died on Cardassia or Betazed or Romulus. But he didn’t because he was good at what he did. 

Even if they mobilized the entire security staff and went level by level looking for him, they’d never find him. He had their communications channels, their surveillance feeds, and even their biosensors. He knew where every single officer on the station was and what they were doing, and he’d know immediately if someone so much as glanced in his direction.

And so, as the pair concluded their exchange and the link grew quiet again, Frank Negrescu leaned back in his chair and took another sip of his whisky. There was nothing to do for now but to wait and to watch as the contagion continued to spread.

As Commander Kris Eriksson walked the promenade, it was the silence that surprised him the most. For a station that never slept, the stillness was haunting, made more real by the isolation of his hazard suit. With the mask down, it almost felt like an away mission to a derelict station. Except, of course, Archanis Station was no derelict, and this was no away mission. It was his station, a trade and commercial hub of twenty thousand, its denizens sequestered in their quarters in an effort to slow the spread of the contagion.

Whether it was obedience or fear that kept everyone home, he wasn’t sure. Captain Anna Vale’s public health addresses were enough to chill anyone to their bones, but people weren’t rational. They weren’t logical. As quickly as they might shelter-in-place, they might also try to make a break for it.  Still, for now at least, the lockdown was holding, and for that, he was thankful, for it meant he didn’t have to put his men at undue risk to enforce it.

“Commander Eriksson, report to visitor quarters, junction alpha six, room forty two.”

“I’ll be right there.”

In order to limit communicability of the highly virulent contagion, the turbolift system had been modified for point-to-point operations only. That meant each rider was dropped off before the next was picked up, slowing transit across the station even with so many tucked away in their quarters. After a wait of nearly five minutes, a lift eventually arrived, ferrying him through the station’s superstructure down twenty one decks to his destination. 

As Commander Eriksson approached, he saw a pair of officers flanking the door. Each was adorned in a hazard suit not unlike his own, adding to the spookiness of the affair with their faces obscured behind their masks. Still, he could see the fear in their eyes. They were doing their duty, but it didn’t mean they didn’t recognize the risks. There was a silent killer stalking the corridors, and so far, there was no cure. If it got you, you were dead.

“What’ve we got?” Commander Eriksson asked.

“The doctor’s inside,” one of his men replied.

Stepping into room forty two along visitor quarters junction alpha six, Commander Eriksson saw Captain Anna Vale, the station’s director of medical services. She wore a medical-grade biohazard suit, essential given her prolonged proximity to the infirmed, and she was standing over the motionless body of a human female, lying supine on the cold floor. 

It didn’t take a close inspection to determine that the middle aged woman lying motionless on the floor was dead. “The virus get her?” Commander Eriksson asked rhetorically.

Captain Vale nodded. “The fourth one we’ve found who never made it to sickbay.”

“What makes this one special?” Commander Eriksson asked, not out of a lack of heart, but just from a simple observation. “You haven’t called me for any of the others.”

“This woman is Dr. Elizabeth Kynes, a propulsion researcher with the Advanced Starship Design Bureau,” Captain Vale explained. “And unfortunately, contact tracing is going to be critical here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, according to her arrival paperwork, she was here for a symposium on the Vaadwaur Underspace,” Captain Vale said as she passed a PADD to the security chief. “One that occurred three days ago and was attended by over five hundred astrophysical researchers from across the quadrant.”

“Ah hell,” Commander Eriksson sighed as he scrolled through the logs. The who’s who of scientific minds from agencies, bureaus, institutes, and universities across the Federation had been in attendance. There’d even been a couple foreigners present from the Romulan Republic and the Klingon Empire. “Do you think this might’ve been the real target?” Ever since they’d determined that the contagion was a bioweapon from the Dominion War, he’d been searching for both a motive and a patient zero.

“That’s more your department than mine,” Captain Vale shrugged. Whether the symposium was the target of the bioweapon’s release or it just occurred by happenstance, she had no idea. “All I can say is that the symposium was well attended, including by our own staff.”

Commander Eriksson frowned. That was a real problem. They’d had a few of their staff come down with the virus, but thankfully, there hadn’t been any significant community spread events determined thus far within their ranks. As he scrolled the list though, he saw name after name from the station. “You think it’s gotten to our staff in substantive numbers?”

“It was bound to happen eventually, but I’d hoped not so quickly,” Captain Vale nodded grimly. “This event occurred a full day before our lockdown protocols went into effect, so I don’t see how not.” Commander Owens’ work pods would limit future community spread, but in this case, anyone Dr. Kynes had infected would have had plenty of time to spread it before those measures went into effect. And that meant, instead of one pod, many might’ve been compromised.

“I’ll tell Commander Owens to start pulling staff out of rotation,” Commander Eriksson said as he continued to scroll through the data from the symposium. “We have proximity data from all Starfleet combadges that’ll allow us to sequester anyone that’s…” But then he stopped mid-sentence, a look of worry washing across his face. 

Captain Vale looked over at him. She could see the concern through his mask. “What is it?”

“Do you know if Polaris has reported any cases yet?” Commander Eriksson asked.

“Thankfully not,” Captain Vale confirmed. “Doctor Henderson’s been able to continue his research unimpeded.” That research was their best hope. “Why?”

“Because they may no longer be contagion-free,” Commander Eriksson said as he raised the PADD up in the air. “One of the speakers was Commander Luke Lockwood, Astrophysical Lead for the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, and combadge prox data puts Dr. Kynes and Commander Lockwood within two meters of each other for an extended period.”

The residents of Archanis Station might have been cowering in fear, but for Dr. Luke Lockwood, the contagion was little more than an afterthought. He had more important things to worry about, mysteries of the universe itself to unlock, and after the symposium, he was feeling energized about the prospect. Would Dr. Keynes or one of the folks from Bilana III, Tomobiki, or Mempa V take him up on his offer? He certainly hoped so. This could be the next great leap forward in superluminal travel as long as one of them was willing to take the plunge.

On this particular evening though, recognizing it would take some time for them to dissect his findings from the Underspace, the astrophysicist turned his attention to another problem that had been eluding him for some time. He’d constructed a derivation of the chronogeometric curvature invariant within a simplified Lorentzian manifold, and now he just needed to translate it into the real spacetime manifold in order to achieve a major breakthrough in the field of temporal mechanics.  Of course, this was an unsolved problem that had eluded physicists for centuries, but he didn’t doubt for a second he could be the one to solve it. 

Today wasn’t that day though. Even the easy stuff, like the Ricci tensor needed within the field equations of the extended model, just wasn’t coming together. The math wasn’t working, but math didn’t just not work. It was brains that didn’t work, and right now, his was the culprit. His thoughts felt foggy, and he was tired. Very tired. But that didn’t make sense. He’d slept in, and he was only nine or ten hours into his workday.

Maybe he just needed another cup of coffee?

Dr. Lockwood stepped away from the board and walked over to the replicator. “Coffee, black, extra strong,” he ordered. And then he coughed. Once, and then again. He felt warm too, and a bit clammy. Maybe it was the late nights before the symposium? His first opportunity to present to competent peers in some time, he’d poured his heart and soul into the works he’d presented.

As the coffee cup began to materialize, his combadge chirped. 

“Henderson to Lockwood.”

Didn’t the doctor have something better to be doing right now than calling down to him? There was a contagion rampaging across Archanis Station and Dr. Henderson was knee deep in his work to develop a cure. “Lockwood here. Go ahead.”

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m in my office,” Dr. Lockwood replied. “As the computer could have confirmed for you.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah, just me and my equations,” Dr. Lockwood grumbled as he looked over at the mess of unsolved equations on his board. “Why do you ask?”

“I need you to stay put and to isolate from any contacts. Someone will be down soon to collect you, and in the meantime, I need you to report all your contacts to Captain Bishop.”

“Oh…” Dr. Lockwood growned. He didn’t have to ask why the instructions. He knew exactly what they meant. If he was being told to isolate and to provide his contacts to the Polaris’ security chief, that meant they’d determined he’d come into contact with someone that had contracted the virus. “Who’s got it?”

“This afternoon, Archanis Station found a deceased woman in her quarters, someone who attended the symposium and, according to badge logs, was in close proximity to you for an extended period of time.”

Dr. Lockwood thought back to the auditorium aboard Archanis Station where, just three days prior, he’d stood proudly presenting his findings on the Underspace to five hundred of the sharpest minds in the quadrant. They’d been mostly at a distance, more than the five meters of separation distance defined by the protocol… except for those who’d come to see him after. “It was Dr. Elizabeth Kynes from the ASDB, wasn’t it?” 

“Yes. How’d you know?”

“Was just a hunch,” Dr. Lockwood frowned. The subspace propulsion researcher from the Advanced Starship Design Bureau had looked a bit sickly when she’d approached the front to ask a question about achieving the appropriate excitation for an Underspace-like compression of subspace anthropogenically. At the time, he’d thought nothing of it, but now with hindsight, it was easy to see. “What a shame. I was looking forward to working with her on the next era of superluminal travel.”

“This is just precautionary though. I’m sure you’ll be alright.”

“Don’t sugarcoat bad news to an empiricist,” Dr. Lockwood countered. “You have no reason to be sure I’ll be alright..” And in his mind, he began to worry. He had been feeling a bit under the weather, if he was honest with himself, and the Ricci tensor really shouldn’t have been giving him so many problems. “I’ll stay put until you guys come for me. I know the routine.”

“I appreciate it, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Henderson out.”

The comlink disconnected, and no sooner had the physicist picked up his coffee from the replicator than a voice came over the loudspeaker.

“All hands. This is the captain.”

As Dr. Lockwood listened, he could hear the fear in Fleet Captain Devreux’s voice.

“We had hoped this moment would not come, but unfortunately it has. While we do not have any confirmed cases aboard the Polaris at this time, based on new information, effective immediately, we are implementing virological containment protocols.”

That new information was about him, Dr. Lockwood knew.

“Except as necessary for continued essential operations, all staff are ordered to return to their quarters and to shelter-in-place until further notice. Department heads will be in touch with further instructions. Devreux out.”

This was real. They were in it now. And it had started with him. But what could he do? His gaze returned to the board. Might as well try to make something of the time while he still had time. Soon, they’d come for him, and if he tested positive for the contagion, well… that wasn’t something he wanted to even think about.

“Does he know yet?” Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux asked, staring through the plexiglass at their head of astrophysics and exotic sciences.

“The results, no,” Dr. James Henderson replied. “But I’m sure he can infer by the fact we’re out here and he’s in there.” 

If Dr. Lockwood had been negative, they would have just come in and told him. But they hadn’t. He was positive, and that meant he’d only know those four walls for the remainder of his days. Unless they found a cure. They needed to find a cure. The clock was ticking, the disease progressed quickly, and the body bags were already starting to pile up on Archanis Station.

“What about the ensign?” Captain Devreux asked. Snarr Vok, the young theoretician from Dr. Lockwood’s lab, had gone to the symposium with his boss, and he too had been in close proximity to the propulsion researcher from the Advanced Starship Design Bureau.

“Unfortunately, he tested positive too,” Dr. Henderson confirmed. “It’s progressing slower with him though, I assume because of his physiology.” There was so much they didn’t know about the Dominion-built bioweapon that’d just resurfaced on Archanis Station after nearly three decades of dormancy.

“Every update from Archanis Station is painful,” Captain Devreux sighed. “But when it’s our own, someone we see every day, it just makes it hurt so much more.” Dr. Lockwood could be a pain in the ass, but he was their pain in the ass, the one who’d made the first breakthrough with the aberrant singularity over Vespara, and the one who’d traced the beacon from Wolf 359 back to Beta Serpentis, among so many others.

“It does,” Dr. Henderson agreed, a dark shadow cast across his face. He’d seen far too much death over his decades in the service of life, but the last year had been particularly bad, rivaling even those wretched years at the height of the Dominion War. “It never gets easier either.”

Captain Devreux, the lifelong explorer, had spent most of his career beyond the reach of the galactic conflicts that his colleagues had faced, but now it had caught up with him. In the past year, he’d seen enough death for a lifetime. 

For a moment, the two just stood there in mournful silence.

But they couldn’t just stand there feeling sorry for themselves. The battle was still raging, and they needed to act. “Did you see Captain Vale’s latest update?” Dr. Henderson prompted.

“No. I saw it come across the wire, but I’ve been a bit busy,” Captain Devreux admitted. The dispatch from Archanis Station’s Director of Medical Services had arrived almost immediately after he’d ordered the ship into lockdown, but even with all the prep work they’d done ahead of time, there’d still been so much to sort out once it went in place. “How bad has it gotten?”

“As of 1900 hours, they’re up to four hundred and eighty.”

“Four hundred and eighty?! How?! They were at only two hundred and fifty this morning…” the captain stammered. And then he realized the lunacy of his word choice. Only two hundred and fifty, he’d said. Had he really just minimized it like that? That was two hundred and fifty souls, and now four hundred and eighty, that would be dead unless they could find a cure. They needed to find a cure. “How the hell did it take off so fast?”

“Estimates from the last time we saw the virus placed its R-nought around ten, and given its virulence, that’s more explosive than it sounds,” Dr. Henderson explained. “Most diseases with such a propagation factor don’t kill the host within a week.” And that was what really worried him, moreso even than his colleague dying on the other side of the glass. If this thing got rolling, it wouldn’t be these two he’d be worried about. It would be some significant portion of the nearly two thousand that called this ship home. “Have you heard from Titus yet?”

“Yes, our new chief is a pro,” Captain Devreux replied, acknowledging Captain Titus Bishop, the new Chief Security and Tactical Officer of the USS Polaris who he’d tasked with contact tracing. “Within twenty minutes, he had all identified persons isolated and confined to quarters.”

“How many?” Dr. Henderson asked. He was acutely aware that the larger the number was, the more likely it would be that someone had slipped through the cracks. And within the confines of this starship, if someone slipped through the craps, that’d mean a great many deaths.

“Thankfully, Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok are as introverted as they come,” Captain Devreux chuckled. The fact that the theorists mostly kept to their lab was about the only good news he had today. “In total, Captain Bishop identified only around three dozen.” 

Dr. Henderson looked skeptical. “That includes second degree contacts too?” They were three days late with Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok, and that meant not only a cohort of directly infected people, but with a forty eight hour incubation period before infectiousness, that cohort could have already gone on to infect another cohort beyond them.

“Yes, including second degree contacts,” Captain Devreux confirmed. “I guess Dr. Lockwood has been completely holed up, taking no visitors and going nowhere besides his office and his quarters. He’s working through some new theorem in temporal chromodynamics. Ensign Vok, meanwhile, took his weekend alone on the holodeck, enjoying a recreation on Sauria. The first degree cohort was pretty much just the shuttle pilot, a couple from the lab, and the poor soul that got assigned to clean Lockwood’s office yesterday.”

Dr. Henderson let out a sigh of relief. If he was honest with himself, as sorry as it was to think this way, there really were no two better than Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok to have come into contact with the disease. Anyone else would have gone on to infect far more. He could only imagine if it had been a different member of the command staff, or someone that worked in a crowded area like main engineering or the bridge.

“You think we got a cap on this?” Captain Devreux asked hopefully. He needed some assurance. He wasn’t ready to see his ship turned into a morgue.

“Only time will tell,” Dr. Henderson cautioned. He wanted to be optimistic, but he knew better when it came to this, a contagion that’d been designed by its creators to end entire worlds. “You know this will be the last time you and I will be able to stand face-to-face until this is all over, right?” He hadn’t even liked that the captain had come down this time, but at least he hadn’t been in contact with Dr. Lockwood or Ensign Vok yet. That wouldn’t be the case much longer.

Captain Devreux furled his brow. He didn’t like what the doctor was intimating.

“I can’t send my people in there without going in myself,” Dr. Henderson elaborated. “And the moment I go in there, I become a threat. I can’t risk infecting you and the rest of the command staff.” Even with biocontainment suits and strict protocols, it was always possible the contagion could break through. He’d seen it happen during the War, forced to watch as several of his fellow first responders became victims themselves. None of them had survived.

“James, your staff can tend to Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok,” Captain Devreux shook his head. “We need you alive and in good health if we’re going to find a cure.”

“It’s just out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Henderson tried to assure the captain. “And I can do both. We have only two patients to tend to. There’ll still be plenty of time to work on the cure, but I need to lead from the front with my team.” And that meant going in there.

Captain Devreux didn’t like the idea, and his expression said as much.

“Gérard, I’m about to ask my staff to risk their lives for these two men,” Dr. Henderson replied with deep conviction. “I won’t ask them to do what we are unwilling to have me do, nor will I stay at arm’s length from those who are in my care simply out of fear for my own life.” It’d been hard enough to stay aboard Polaris when cases began flooding Archanis Station, but to shirk away when it was his own shipmates in there? He couldn’t do that.

Captain Devreux wanted to argue, but the look on the doctor’s face told him that it would be futile. Even if he made it an order, Dr. Henderson’s convictions were too strong. “Very well,” the captain conceded, wondering inwardly if he’d consented to allowing the doctor to sign his own death warrant unless they found a cure. “Any progress on finding a way out of this thing?”

“The virological vector is both biologically and technically sophisticated, engineered to evade our attempts to stop it through the rapid rate at which it mutates once it infects a host,” Dr. Henderson explained. “The most promising line of research so far is Dr. Verhoeven’s work to reverse engineer the vector’s primordial strain, which would allow us to produce a vaccine. But it’s still little more than a theory at this point.” And even a vaccine, he knew, would do nothing for Dr. Lockwood, Ensign Vok, and the others already infected.

“Anything from Starfleet Medical or any of the institutes?” Captain Devreux asked. The doctor, he knew, had been in touch with colleagues across the quadrant.

“The Tri-Planetary Academy passed along some ideas about therapeutics to delay progression, but otherwise, just condolences from those who remember this from the last time and blank stares from those who don’t,” Dr. Henderson sighed. “It’s a shame, after facing this during the War, that no one had the foresight to continue to invest research on it in case it resurfaced again.”

“What about the other governments?”

“The Klingon Empire, which saw it during the War, suggested we do what they did last time,” Dr. Henderson frowned. Their suggestion had been most unhelpful.

“Which was?”

“Load up the infected on a transport and send them to glory in a last stand against the enemy.”

“How very Klingon of them,” Captain Devreux grumbled. That wasn’t Starfleet’s way, and even if it was, they didn’t even know who their enemy was this time. They had made no progress on determining who’d unleashed this plague upon them this time. “What about the Romulans, the Cardassians, or others?”

“Not so much as a response from any other power with the capacity to engineer a cure,” Dr. Henderson replied. “Which means they either don’t know anything, or they’re unwilling to share.”

A depressing thought, however you cut it. Captain Devreux turned back to the glass, looking once more at the physicist on the other side. “What’re you going to tell him?”

“The truth,” Dr. Henderson replied flatly. “Luke Lockwood is an empiricist. He’ll appreciate it factual and straight up.” He’d see right through any sugarcoating too.

“He’s also a problem solver,” Captain Devreux offered as an idea dawned on him. It was a hail mary at best – Dr. Lockwood was a physicist, not a biologist – but what else could they do?

Dr. Henderson tilted his head quizzically. He wasn’t following.

“You have one of the greatest minds of our generation in there, and you’ve said it yourself: it’s engineering is sophisticated, both biologically and technically,” Captain Devreux pointed out. “Enlist Dr. Lockwood in your pursuit. So long as he has the strength, give him a chance to save himself, and maybe he’ll save us all.” 

The quirky astrophysicist had done it before, pulling off a miracle when none thought possible. Maybe he could do it again.

Seven hundred. That was the latest reported number of cases, the number that would soon be dead. Soon though, the lockdown’s effect would start to show. That meant they were just about at the peak. It was time for his next move.

The turbolift whirred to life as it ferried Frank Negrescu from his covert hideaway through the cavernous superstructure of the Canopus-class starbase. Starfleet had been hunting him, but they’d never come close. Not that he’d expected them to. He’d evaded far more devious foes for far longer. Starfleet, with all the restraints it puts upon its men, couldn’t hold a candle to the Tal’Shiar or the Obsidian Order, and neither of them had caught him either.

After a short ride, the turbolift drew to a halt, its doors opening to welcome him onto the main promenade. Usually packed with visitors, it was completely devoid of life now, a far cry from what it had been just a few days earlier when Captain Kioshi had confronted him over a glass of fine Aldebaran whisky. The old man was a fool, but he’d been right about one thing: death was coming. It wasn’t Negrescu’s fault though. No, fault lay with the captain, and all those like him. They were charged with protecting the Federation, but they’d been asleep at the wheel as it barreled towards oblivion. Maybe this would be their wake up call. But probably not.

Dressed in dark gray cargo pants and a black leather jacket, Negrescu made no effort to hide himself as he meandered along the empty concourse, peering through darkened shop windows and perusing display cases. The time for hiding was over, but there was no one here to find him. They were either looking for him elsewhere or they were occupied tending to the dying souls filling in their infirmaries.

Eventually, Frank Negrescu found himself sitting against a wide sweeping window, nibbling on a Denobulan scone he’d helped himself to from one of the concession stands. Looking out at the starscape, he could see the Odyssey class spaceframe of the USS Polaris hanging stationary in the distance. What shape was Admiral Reyes’ ship in? Had the contagion made the leap to her flagship? She’d be important in what was to come next.

“Stop!”

Finally, Negrescu thought to himself as he set down his scone.

“What are you doing up here?”

Negrescu turned slowly to see a security officer, clad in a hazard suit, standing at a distance of nearly twenty meters. The man didn’t dare advance closer. Even with his breather, he knew the risks. The contagion could be anywhere, and everyone was a threat.

“You’re not supposed to be up here. By order of the health officer…” 

But then he stopped mid-sentence. Suddenly, the contagion was the least of the security officer’s worries. He recognized the balding old man. This was Frank Negrescu, the person of interest they’d been briefed on by Captain Kioshi.

“Stay right where you are!” 

The security officer’s phaser came up as he spoke.

“I’d rather not,” smirked Negrescu, unperturbed by the sidearm now leveled at him. It wasn’t like this kid would shoot, and even if he did, it was certainly set to stun. “But since we’re here, why don’t you be a doll and call someone with a bit more authority than you?”

“That’s not how this works.”

“Actually, it is,” Negrescu chuckled condescendingly. He studied patterns and processes for a living, as those patterns and processes were where weaknesses manifested. “You’re not going to apprehend me alone. You’ve certainly been told that I’m armed and dangerous, so policy dictates you call for backup, and when they hear who you’ve got here, they’ll send someone with more pips.”

The former intelligence captain wasn’t wrong, and after an embarrassingly long few minutes, the security officer holding him at gunpoint awkwardly while he leaned back relaxedly in his chair, a small troupe arrived. Just like the first security officer, the four newly arrived were clad in hazard suits, but unlike him, they carried rifles, not sidearms. Not that it mattered though. None of this bravado would keep them safe from the real enemy.

“Commander Eriksson,” Negrescu smiled as his eyes fell on the eldest among them, the chief of station security that he recognized from his review of the station’s dossiers. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.” He’d been surveilling the chief and his men as they searched futilely for him. “A valiant effort, but a sorry waste of time.”

“Frank Negrescu,” Commander Eriksson replied gruffly, both pleased they’d found him but also disappointed Captain Kioshi had been right. “You must know it’s not safe to be out and about?” He chose to start in simple terms, to try and elicit some more information from the old man.

“Oh no, it’s perfectly safe for me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I need not explain myself to you,” Negrescu replied sharply. He needed someone with more influence, and someone he could trust. The chief was just a mid-level functionary.

“Then who will you explain yourself to?”

“How about Captain Jake Lewis?” Negrescu asked.

“He’s not here,” Commander Eriksson frowned, curious why the shady old man was asking about a commanding officer from one of Polaris squadron’s ships. “He and the Serenity are otherwise indisposed.” The Duderstadt-class fast cruiser had been lost in the final moments of the Underspace crisis, but the commander chose to stay vague on the details.

That was a twist Negrescu hadn’t expected. He’d been out of the loop for too long. Looking out the window, he settled for the second best option. “Well, since I see the Polaris isn’t otherwise indisposed, how about Admiral Reyes then?” If his protege wasn’t available, the fleet admiral would be the next best option. They had a history. He trusted her, and she’d trust him.

“She’s not here either,” Commander Eriksson replied, entertaining the old man out of curiosity. “Left with the Diligent a week ago.” Again, he dared not elaborate further until he knew more.

Unfortunate, Negrescu thought to himself. It meant he was going to have to improvise. “How about Grayson then?” He’d never met the rear admiral before, but given the trauma he lived with, Alexander Michael Grayson was the sort that might do what needed to be done.

Commander Eriksson stared at him warily. “How about the brig, instead?” He wasn’t going to take this dangerous man of dubious motives to the sector commander.

“If you want this to end,” Negrescu stated darkly, his eyes narrowing on the chief. “You’ll do as I say.”