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.”