Finally, she turned and headed back toward the medical office, ignoring Narat's stares. That extra prion in the Ferengi held the secret to the cure. And as Dukat had just made very clear, she didn't have much time to find it.

Chapter Twenty-nine

BAJOR FILLED THE VIEWPORTS of the docking ring as the sounds of fighting echoed down the corridor. Kellec Ton knelt in the hallway and quickly wrapped the burned arm of a Bajoran fighter, then injected him with a quick painkiller.

"You'll be all right," Kellec said, patting the man on the leg.

The man nodded weakly, as Kellec moved and crouched next to the woman leaning against the bulkhead two steps away. Plague, in its middle stage. The woman looked to be about Kellec's age and her skin had the rosy glow of the disease. Her face was dirty and she was starting to smell of rot. He quickly injected her with the temporary cure, and then monitored her as the medicine started to work. She was going to make it, at least for another ten hours or so. "Rest here as long as you can," he said, and she nodded.

He stood and checked the level of his hypospray. He had enough for another thirty or so, then he'd be forced to try to make his way through the fighting to one of the medical labs.

Down the hall to his right the fighting was raging, as the Carda.s.sian guards tried to retake this area of the docking ring. So far his people had held them off, but it didn't look as if that would last long. He'd been forced here by following the wounded and sick workers. It was like following a never-ending road of blood and death.

With the fighting echoing behind him, he moved down the large hall. A low moan caught his attention, coming from an alcove. Three Bajoran workers lay in the dark, against the wall. The smell in the small area made it seem as if they'd been dead for a week, but he could tell that two of them were still breathing. Barely.

He scanned them quickly. The two who were still alive both needed to be in one of the medical areas, but at the moment that wasn't possible. With all the fighting there was no one to take them there and no way to get there.

He gave both survivors full plague shots, then quickly checked them again. They might make it. He didn't have much choice but to leave them and keep helping others. At this point he'd done everything he could for them. They were so far gone that if they did recover they wouldn't even remember him being here.

He went back out into the main hallway, as a group of seven Bajoran workers moved past and turned into one of the docking-bay corridors. Two of them carried Carda.s.sian weapons, while the others carried iron bars. Three of them looked as if they were in the early stages of the plague.

"Hold on," Kellec shouted. He ran up behind them and quickly injected one of the men who he could tell was quickly getting sick.

"You Kellec Ton?" A man with a b.l.o.o.d.y rag wrapped around his arm stepped forward.

"I am," Kellec said. Kellec pointed at the other one clearly coming down with the plague. "You need this." He held up his hypospray.

The man nodded and moved up to where Kellec could inject him.

Then Kellec looked at the rest of them. "Have the rest of you been given the plague cure in the last four or five hours?"

All of them nodded.

"We're getting out of here," the man with the b.l.o.o.d.y arm said. "Heading for Bajor. Help with the fighting there. You want to come along?" "You won't make it," Kellec said, shaking his head. "Sure we will," the man said. "That's a Carda.s.sian ore freighter right there, and we have two pilots among us."

"And there's a very large Carda.s.sian fleet surrounding the station," Kellec said, pointing out the viewport.

"That's what the Carda.s.sians want us to think," the man said, laughing. "We'll just drop right straight down and be on Bajor before what ships there are out there even know we've moved."

Kellec shook his head. "Don't waste all your lives."

The man with the bandaged arm stepped right up into Kellec's face. "We're going home and no Carda.s.sian sympathizer is going to stop us."

The blow caught Kellec squarely in the stomach, sending him backward onto the deck gasping for breath. He couldn't believe the man had hit him.

"See you, Doctor," the man said, motioning for the men to turn around and head into the freighter.

Kellec tried to shout no, but there was no breath left in him. His stomach felt as if it were holding his lungs in a death grip. No air was going in or out. His shout came out as more of a choking gag.

By the time Kellec could even get his lungs to take in a small amount of air, the men were in the freighter and the lock had rolled closed.

Kellec stumbled to his feet and moved over to a viewport just as the freighter disengaged itself from the station and turned toward Bajor. The planet looked so close, so large.

Maybe they would make it.

Maybe he had been wrong.

Three seconds later the ship exploded as two shots from Carda.s.sian warships blew it apart like a child's balloon against a pin.

"No!" Kellec shouted, then dropped down onto the deck, his head in his hands.

He sat there for a few moments, until the sounds of fighting grew in the corridor to his right. He had to keep going, to keep curing people for as long as he could.

He pulled himself back to his feet, facing Bajor and the expanding cloud of wreckage from the ore ship.

"Stupid fools," he said.

Beyond the wreckage, against the blackness of s.p.a.ce, he could see three Carda.s.sian warships. He knew, without a doubt, there were a lot more than that surrounding the station at this moment. He knew, without a doubt, those warships would blast this entire station if a cure wasn't found soon.

He picked up his hypospray and checked it to make sure it was still working, then headed in the direction away from the sounds of the fighting.

"Hurry, Katherine," he said to the walls and to the image of Bajor below him. "Hurry."

Chapter Thirty

PULASKI STARED AT THE IMAGE of the three prions on the screen. They seemed so harmless. The smallest living things known. She'd studied them in medical school. Everyone had. They were mostly of interest only because they were so small. Yet these three prions in front of her could mutate into a deadly virus when joined. They were far from harmless.

And one of them had been created by a biologically manufactured mutation in a Ferengi's body. It was no wonder the incubation period for this plague had taken so long. That special prion had had to travel through air or fluids from the Bajorans, then to a Ferengi, and then to a Carda.s.sian, where it combined with two other naturally occurring prions to form a deadly virus.

Then that virus mutated into a deadly virus for Carda.s.sians. Amazingly complex.

Yet it was an elegantly simple way to wipe out two races.

And so far impossible to stop.

Whoever had designed this had thought of almost everything. Even if the Ferengi were removed from the station and Bajor, the special prion was already here and multiplying in Carda.s.sian and Bajoran bodies. She had no doubt that with the long incubation period it had already traveled to Carda.s.sia. The Ferengi had been the start, but they were now no longer needed in the final deadly result. She stared at that fourth prion. It revealed nothing. She shoved her chair back and rubbed her eyes. She couldn't remember the last time she had slept or even eaten much more than a handful of nuts and a gla.s.s of water. But from her conversation in the hallway with Dukat two hours ago, she might not need to eat or sleep ever again. She didn't know how much time they had left, but she bet it wasn't much.

Behind her Governo, at another monitor, let out a long sigh. "Nothing?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said. "I just don't understand what draws the three prions together. There has to be some sort of molecular attraction."

Pulaski looked at her a.s.sistant for a moment, letting what he had said sink in. He was right. There had to be something working between the prions that drew them together. And if she had to wager, she would bet that attraction was in that special prion created by the Ferengi mutation.

She'd been focusing all her energy on trying to find a way to kill the prions, not on why they went together. It hadn't even occurred to her to look in that area. It was lucky Governo had.

"There's just no way to isolate what that attraction might be at such a small, microscopic level," Governo said, "at least not without months of trial and error."

"We don't have months," she said. She doubted they even had hours left.

"I know," Governo said.

She stared over Governo's shoulder at the image of the prions on the screen. They were slowly working their way toward each other in the solution.

"I think the attraction comes from this one," Governo said, highlighting the prion with a red glow. Suddenly, staring at that red glow, Pulaski had the solution.

"What happens if we coat it?" she said.

"What?" Governo said, turning to stare at her.

"See the red highlight you have on that prion?"

He glanced around at it. "Yes?"

"You said you think the special prion is attracting the others in some unseen way. Right?" He nodded.

"So what would happen if we coated all the prions somehow, and try to block the attraction, whatever it might be."

Governo nodded. "It might work. But first we have to find something that will stick to them."

Pulaski moved quickly to the door and out into the lab area. Narat was working over a sick Carda.s.sian. Ogawa and Marvig huddled over a badly injured Bajoran.

"Listen up everyone," Pulaski said to her team. "I need at least a dozen blood cultures from all three races, virus-free but full of prions, set up at once. And then I need another dozen being set up right behind the first dozen. Make it fast." "Did you find a cure?" Narat asked.

"We don't know yet," she said, heading for the nearest Carda.s.sian to start drawing samples of blood. "And until we get these cultures set up, we won't know. You want to help?"

Narat had the common sense not to say anything more. But he instantly went to work beside her.

It took them thirty minutes to get everything set and ready to go for the first tests.

And another twenty minutes and seven failures before they found a molecular cousin of an iodine derivative that actually stuck to the prions, turning all of them the same shade of sickly brown. It was as if the prions had been dipped in dye.

"Now," Pulaski said, staring at the monitor in the office, "we need to find something that will ride on the iodine carrier, something that will block the attraction."

"I don't think we're going to need to," Governo said, his voice an octave higher than she had ever heard it. "Look at this!"

She watched the monitor where he was pointing. The sickly brown prions in the solution were moving past each other, not seeming to even notice. The attraction between them seemed to be gone.

"Color?" Pulaski said. "Could the attraction have been something as simple as color?"

"Or maybe they hate the derivative," Governo said. "At such a microscopic level, anything is possible."

They both stared at the prions for a few more long moments. But unlike what had been happening in previous tests, these prions were no longer interested in each other. And without that interest, they wouldn't form the deadly virus.

Governo looked up at her, his smile filling his face. "It's working. It's actually working."

Pulaski stepped back quickly into the medical lab. "How many more cultures from all three races are set up?"

"Six each," Ogawa said.

"I want to use all of them to test the iodine derivative. Quickly. Everyone monitor the cultures and put the computer on them as well. We don't want any prions to join."

Ten minutes later the tests, with the entire team watching closely, seemed to be conclusive. But she had to be sure-and at this point all normal medical procedures were long out the airlock.

"Now we try it in patients," she said.

Narat looked at her. That hesitation was built into both of them. But they had to get past it. They had to work quickly, or they would lose every chance they had. If the Carda.s.sians blew up Terok Nor and then killed everyone on Bajor, they still wouldn't have stopped the plague. They would have committed genocide and a few days later gotten sick on Carda.s.sia Prime.

And they would have unknowingly killed off their best chance to a solution. Narat nodded.

Pulaski quickly mixed the iodine derivative with the cure and injected it into two Carda.s.sians and two Bajorans, plus the older Ferengi.

Eighteen minutes later she had enough faith in their cure to call Dukat.

His face appeared on the screen. He wasn't the strong, confident Carda.s.sian leader he'd been when she'd arrived. Now he looked more like a tired street fighter. And when he saw her he didn't even smile. "We have it," she said. "And you're sure it's permanent this time?" "As sure as I can be under these conditions."

He nodded. "Get some to Narat and start the distribution. I'll see what I can do to convince the ships outside." "I will," she said.

He cut the connection. Behind her Governo said, "Not even a thank-you." She dropped down into the chair and took a deep breath. "Not yet," she said, staring at the blank screen. "If we survive the next few hours, then he might thank us."

She glanced at the Carda.s.sians who were getting this new version of the cure, and the Bajorans, who were walking around again, and the Ferengi, who was clapping his ears and jumping up and down, dearly gleeful that he felt better.

Governo followed her gaze. She smiled at him tiredly, and said, "I think we have all the thanks we need right here." Epilogue IT TOOK TWO WEEKS. They were smarter than he thought. His observers had reported back, saying the virus had been defeated yet again.

He was glad he was doing test cases. He had underestimated the intelligence of his foes. But he wouldn't do that again. He would be very careful next time. And, if it took a few more attempts, he would make them. He wanted to do this right. He would do this right.

And one day soon, he would succeed.

When someone said lack of pain was the best experience in the world, Quark had never understood them. But after this week, he did. His ears no longer itched and, more importantly, the pustules were gone from his ear ca.n.a.l. The female doctor had p.r.o.nounced him well before she left-and her casual fingering of his lobes had proven that he still had ear function.

His ears were operating in another capacity now. They were reveling in the sound of a full bar. The fighting had stopped, which was too bad for the Bajorans but did ensure that Quark's black-market business would kick back up soon. Carda.s.sians crowded the Dabo table, spending hard-earned latinum. They were drinking to wonderful excess, and a few were so happy to be alive they were splurging on expensive liquors, many of which Rom did not even know the names of.

Rom would come back to the bar, tray in hand, and mangle an order, often so badly that Quark would have to go to the table himself to clarify. But he was in too good a mood to be angry. He'd let Rom get away with his incompetence today. Tomorrow would be another story. Tomorrow, Rom and Nog had to start saving their salaries for another gold-plated ear brush, one Quark had had his eye on for a long, long time.

They would give him the funds, of course, or even better, he would never pay them and use the money for that brush. Which he would then keep locked up-and he would wear the key around his neck. He didn't want to risk cross-contamination again.

No matter what that female doctor and Kellec Ton had said. They believed that someone, or something, had actually brought the virus to the bar. They believed that the Ferengi had been infected first. Quark had begged them and even tried to bribe them to prevent them from sharing that insight with Narat, and in the end they had agreed. Kellec Ton, to Quark's surprise, negotiated the bribe: He wanted Quark to help with the Bajoran resistance on the station. In small ways. Funneling in messages or supplies, or helping someone escape Odo's eye. Quark refused, until Kellec Ton reminded him that they could easily reinfect the Ferengi-and make certain the virus didn't spread beyond Quark, Rom, and Nog.

Quark didn't believe the threat. He didn't think Kellec Ton was that sort of man (and the hu-man female's attempt to hide her laughter reinforced that) but, on the off-chance that the threat was real, Quark agreed to those terms, for a time of limited duration. He suggested a week. Kellec suggested a month. They had compromised on two weeks.

Which was good enough for Quark. It protected his bar, his livelihood, and, much as he hated to admit it, his family. For it looked like Rom and Nog weren't going anywhere soon. And that meant that Quark had to teach them to be at least mildly competent.