Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

Edit: Previous chapters had a discrepancy where some listed the shuttle's designation as "Shuttlecraft Bravo" and others as "Shuttlecraft Beta." This has been changed to "Shuttlecraft Bravo" throughout. In the future I will try not to get my NATO and Greek alphabets mixed up. :)

Fateful Decision

USS Endurance, Sam Hayashi's Log, Supplamental:

We've escaped from a close encounter with a Klingon warship, but the maneuver threw Ensign Bratxal from his seat to the floor. He's not responding and I can see blood beneath his head. Oh, God help!

Doctor Lenaris stormed into the cockpit of the shuttle from the aft cabin. His uniform jacket was partially undone and stained with sweat while his gray hair was tousled and tangled with his earring. "This had better be pretty important," he grumbled. "Do you have any idea what you—" His voice trailed off as he saw Sam kneeling over Ensign Bratxal, who lay face-down on the floor, a small blue bloodstain spreading beneath his head. Lenaris staggered over to kneel beside the downed Bolian as well, pushing Sam roughly aside. "Get out of my way and grab a medkit, girl," he said, pulling out a medical tricorder.

Sam glared at him as she got her balance, but she rose to her feet and hurried to get the medkit down out of storage. Bratxal's life may have been in danger: her grudge match with Lenaris could wait.

Lenaris, meanwhile, had turned Bratxal over. The Bolian was unconscious, bleeding from a gash on his forehead. The doctor thrust a hand at Sam. "Dermal regenerator," he said. "Now!"

Sam fumbled the kit open, scattering its contents. She snatched up a long, narrow device and handed it to Lenaris. He held the device over the unconscious Bolian but stared at it before using it. "What are you trying to do, get me to kill him, Ensign?" he demanded. He thrust the instrument in her face. "This is laser scalpel!" He tossed it across the cabin and picked up a nearly-identical device. "This is a dermal regenerator! Don't tell me you can't tell the difference."

"Honestly, no, I can't," Sam said defensively. "They both look the same to me."

"What do they teach cadets these days?" Lenaris grumbled, activating a blue beam and passing it over the cut. The cut closed after a single pass and Lenaris wiped the blood away from Bratxal's face with his uniform sleeve while running another tricorder scan. "Nothing more I can do for him," he muttered to himself.

Sam bit her lip. "Is he going to die?"

"Yes, but no sooner than the rest of us," said Lenaris, rising. "He has a mild concussion, but he may not regain consciousness. Something is suppressing his central nervous system. I suspect it's whatever killed Naisa."

"Naisa is dead?"

"Didn't I just say that, Ensign?"

Sam tried not to let him ruffle her. This was important. She needed to concentrate. "What killed her?" she asked.

"If I knew, I'd tell you. I was just in the middle of running an autopsy when you rudely interrupted my work."

Sam rolled her eyes and got to her feet. "Well forgive me, sir," she said sarcastically. "I just thought one of my crewmates might be brain-dead or bleeding out. I'll try not to let it bother me in the future!"

"Bleeding out?" Lenaris huffed. "Head wounds bleed a lot, I'll grant you, especially on Bolians, but that's not even close. I could show you bleeding out."

Sam's hand drifted to her hip, where her phaser was holstered. "Is that a threat, sir?" she said, eyes narrowing.

He glared at her. "If it is, what do you intend to do about it?"

Sam's fingers brushed the handle of the phaser. It would be easy. Lenaris was standing just five feet away and there wasn't anything the old man could do to stop her if she decided to draw on him. Her anger bubbled up and she had the urge to do just that, but she remembered when she'd held a phaser on Bratxal just a few minutes earlier. The phaser was still set on level 10: the kill setting. She made herself lower her hand and take a step back.

She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. That was way harder than it should have been, she thought. This is the second time today I've nearly killed a fellow Starfleet officer. This isn't like me at all! I've got more angst than half the mecha pilots in anime combined, and that's saying something. "What's wrong with me?" she wondered aloud.

Lenaris glared at her for a moment longer, then lowered his eyes. He ran a hand through his hair, further tangling it with his earring. "Judging from the fact that you're out of uniform and as emotionally on-edge as I am, I'd say the same thing that's wrong with me and Bratxal, and the same thing that went wrong with the crew of Shuttlecraft Alpha. Our bodies and our minds are behaving like we're increasingly and severely intoxicated, but there's nothing in our systems that can explain it."

Sam opened her eyes and looked to the doctor. "And what will happen to us?"

"If I don't find a cure, and we don't kill each other first, the same thing that happened to Naisa," he said. "Her central nervous system became so deeply supressed that it stopped functioning. First her breathing went, and then her other autonomic functions. I kept her alive as long as I could, but my options were pretty limited without opening up the isolation chamber." He shook his head. "Multiple organ failure, cause unknown."

Sam swallowed. "But that's consistent with whatever's going on here, right?" she asked. "It's just like alcohol."

"In massive overdose, yes." He sighed. "I know I've heard about something like this before, but I can't think where." He shook his head. "Something about people freezing to death fully clothed in the shower." He rubbed sweat from his forehead. "Speaking of which, Computer, what's the temperature in here?"

"Cabin temperature has been set at ten degrees Celsius. "

"Lower it by a degree," said Sam.

"Belay that," said Lenaris. "That's half the normal temperature already. We keep this up and we'll freeze to death."

"But why do I feel so hot?" asked Sam.

Lenaris pulled out his tricorder and scanned her. "It's one of the symptoms of alcohol intoxication in humanoids," he said. "It causes the dilation of blood vessels, bringing more, warmer blood to the surface, where it spends its time warming up your skin's heat sensing nerves and the surrounding air instead of keeping your internal organs the temperature they're supposed to be." He shut the tricorder. "You're already showing early signs of hypothermia. If I were you, I'd put the uniform jacket back on."

Sam nodded and did so numbly. "This is just like what happened on the other shuttle," she said. She turned back to the doctor. "You said it reminded you of something, of people freezing to death."

"Fully clothed in the shower," he said. "Don't ask me where, but I remember some incident that involved it, unless my mind is playing tricks on me now."

Sam shook her head. "No, I remember it too." She raised a finger. "The Enterprise," she said suddenly. "That's it: it was connected with the Enterprise."

"Which one?"

"The first one, I think…or maybe it was the Enterprise-D," she walked over to one of the consoles and pulled up a library database query. "Computer, display all available records relating to the USS Enterprise's visit to—what was it?—Psi 2000?"

"Access established," said the computer. A list of logs and files appeared on Sam's display. She opened them one by one.

"I was right," she said. "It was the original Enterprise. Look here: Captain's Log, Stardate 1704.2: the science party we were to have picked up has been found dead—blah, blah, blah—station personnel frozen to death—etc—one found fully clothed in the shower…"

"Let me see that," said Lenaris, pushing past her. Sam felt a flare of anger, but she made herself calm down. He was only caught up in the discovery she'd just made, after all, not actually trying to get on her nerves.

"Polywater," he said, after studying the files for a minute. "Of course, that makes sense. Tricorders aren't normally configured to scan for it, and it's so rare…" He opened his tricorder and quickly recalibrated it. Then he ran it over Sam, Bratxal, and himself. He nodded grimly. "There are high concentrations of polywater in all of us," he said.

"Polywater?"

"That's what I said. It's a chain of water molecules, all bonded together, end to end. It's only formed under extreme gravimetric conditions, like the collapse of a planet, or a star," he said.

"Or a merger of binaries?"

Lenaris nodded. "Once formed, it can pick up carbon from the humanoid body. It causes symptoms similar to alcohol intoxication and spreads like a virus, causing other water molecules to polymerize, which cause others to polymerize, and so on. It's a chain reaction that keeps running until it reaches equilibrium concentrations."

"Which is apparently at levels high enough to be lethal," said Sam.

Lenaris mopped his brow. "That's one of the things that doesn't make sense here. Polywater intoxication spreads only by skin-to-skin contact, and it's not directly lethal."

Sam thought back. "I touched Naisa when I was on the other shuttle. I don't think I touched Bratxal, though, at least not until a few minutes ago."

Lenaris nodded. "So, you should be infected, but you didn't touch me, and I didn't touch anyone on the shuttle. I'm as intoxicated as you are, though, and Bratxal is nearly the same. It doesn't make any sense!"

Just then, the computer chimed. "Decryption sequence complete," it said.

"What's that?"

"The datapad I brought back from the other shuttle," Sam said. "I had the computer decrypting its contents." She turned to the datapad. "Computer, display decrypted file."

The computer acknowledged with a tone and, to Sam's surprise, a video file appeared on the Klingon datapad's screen. On it, the face of an Orion woman—Naisa, she supposed—appeared with a damaged Klingon shuttle in the background.

The Orion woman smiled coldly. "If you're viewing to this recording, it means that I'm already dead…and you soon will be. My name is Naisa D'falas, and I am dying here already. I have what your physicians call Darnay's Disease, and though I'm still in the earliest stages, there is no cure, and the disease is always terminal." She glared from the screen. "I am determined not to go quietly, though. I will make a name for myself, by being the one to destroy the Federation once and for all."

Sam shivered. "Did it suddenly get creepy in here, or is it just her?" she whispered.

"Hush," Lenaris snapped, his eyes fixed on the screen.

"I've engineered a unique strain of polywater," Naisa went on. "Like its naturally-occurring cousins, it can evade detection and decontamination techniques, but unlike them, it can kill its victims directly. What's more, it's a highly contagious airborne form. No matter what precautions you've taken, you're no doubt infected by now. The polywater is present in the perspiration on the skin, the fluids of the body, the moisture of the breath, and the very humidity of the air. It can lie in wait on any surface for decades. It can survive freezing, and upon contact with environmentally controlled air, it will immediately return to an airborne form and infect the surrounding atmosphere." She smiled. "You'll find it's literally unstoppable, and of course, there is no cure." Behind her in the video the air stirred and the whine of a shuttle's atmospheric engines could be heard. Naisa's smile broadened, showing teeth. "Looks like my first victims are here." She raised a hypospray to her neck and injected herself. "Now, we both only have a few hours to live. Enjoy them, and remember me." With that, the video ended and the screen went black.

Sam let out a long breath. "Well, I think we can safely say that she was evil, and that we are not sorry she's dead."

"And that she's taking us with her," said Lenaris, pulling out his tricorder.

"Yeah…I'm not really sure how I feel about that, but I'm gonna say not cool."

Lenaris looked up at her. "Do you ever stop talking, Ensign?"

Sam bit her lip and made no reply.

The doctor didn't wait for her. He held up his tricorder and ran a scan of the cockpit. "She's right," he said at last. "There are significant concentrations of polywater in the air, and virtually every surface on the ship is coated with it." His face darkened. "We're a plague ship, waiting for a port to devastate. If we return to Endurance like this, everyone aboard the ship will be dead and cold by this time tomorrow."

"We've got to warn them," said Sam. She turned to the comm station, but stopped short. The console was dark, with burn marks and cracked paneling. "Computer, what's the status of our communications systems?" she asked.

"Communication systems are offline," said the computer. "Transmitter and receiver arrays have been damaged."

"Great," she said. Sam moved to the copilot's seat and pulled up the sensor readout. "The Endurance is on her way here already. ETA ten minutes."

"We're going to infect them and kill them all," said Lenaris.

"There has to be a way we can stop this, a cure or something," said Sam.

"In ten minutes?"

"I can buy more time," Sam insisted. "There's a Y-class planet nearby. Their sensors should have a hard time picking us out from there."

Lenaris shook his head. "It's no use. You heard what she said: there is no cure. Even if there were, I don't have the equipment or the time to synthesize it."

"I said I could buy you more time—"

"You don't get it, do you?" said Lenaris, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "We have hours to live, hours! I can't even begin to research a cure in that time." He shook his head. "No, our lives are over. The only thing we can do now is accept that and try to save the Endurance."

"Accept that?" Sam repeated, disbelieving. "How can you just accept that?"

"It's easy enough if you have the wits to realize what's at stake," said Lenaris. "Computer, what's the status of the self-destruct system?"

"Self-destruct system is fully operational."

Sam's eyes went wide. "Whoa, whoa! What are you doing?"

"Ending the threat to Endurance the only way we can," he said. "Not a single molecule of polywater can be allowed to reach the ship, and the only way to ensure that is to destroy it, and everything aboard."

"But we're aboard!"

"That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

But Sam wasn't. "Don't…don't the Prophets frown on suicide?"

"I'm sure they'll make an exception."

"But there's got to be another way!"

Lenaris looked at her. "It's either us or them, Ensign. The three of us die, or the whole crew is killed—and after them maybe the whole of Starfleet, who knows! You could end up saving more lives in death than all of those doctors at the Juetean medical symposium combined."

"I would rather save them and live," said Sam.

"And what makes you think God or the universe or whatever it is you believe in gives a damn what you want?" Lenaris challenged.

"Well, I'd like to believe that if God made me alongside everything else, He had a pretty compelling reason to do so, and that He cares and plans accordingly," said Sam. "I've been through too many close-calls flying to believe otherwise."

The Bajoran doctor huffed. "If you'd seen what I'd seen, you'd know different," he said. "The Occupation, the forced labor camps, the bloodied bodies of resistance fighters, the Dominion, the Klingons…if the Prophets—or whatever god you believe in—have a plan, they certainly couldn't care less about us." For a moment, Sam though she saw tears shining in Lenaris' eyes, but then he turned away. "Computer, arm the self-destruct, authorization Lenaris-pi-one-three-oh."

"Warning," said the computer. "Self-destruct has been armed. Confirm command code to initiate final countdown."

"I can't let you do this," said Sam. Her hand drifted toward her hip. "There's another way, just let me take the time to find it!"

Lenaris shook his head. Now she really could see tears running down his cheeks. "This is the only way, girl. I'm sorry."

As he spoke, Sam drew her phaser. She thumbed the setting up seven levels. "I'm sorry, too," she said.

If Lenaris heard the phaser powering up, he didn't acknowledge it. "Computer, this is Doctor Lenaris Bekni," he said. "Command code is zero, zero, zero, destruct, ze—"

Sam raised the phaser in one smooth motion and fired.

Author's Note: And now you know what happened to Bratxal. That's the good news. The bad news is there's another cliffhanger here…and the so-so news is that I'll make sure you know what happens to Lenaris first thing next chapter.

Also, if you hadn't guessed, yes, the disease here is a version of the ailment that struck the Enterprise NCC-1701 in "The Naked Time" and the Enterprise-D in "The Naked Now." Both episodes featured someone in the original group of victims being discovered frozen to death while showering fully clothed. In both cases polywater was the culprit, but I believe it was only named as such in the Next Generation episode. The log entry Sam quotes is an abridgement of the actual log entries from the Original Series episodes, except the part about the fellow in the shower has been added, as it was not mentioned in the log.

Naisa's disease (Darnay's disease) is an incurable terminal disease mentioned in "The Schizoid Man." I don't know whether or not it can affect species other than humans (such as Orions), but since it doesn't say it's only for humans on Memory Alpha, I'm going to say it can be contracted by Orions as well.

The final self-destruct authorization is a tribute to The Search for Spock, where this was the final code that the commanding officer needed to enter into the Enterprise computer to initiate the 1-minute countdown. There's really no logical reason for a shuttle to have the same self-destruct program: it was just fun to do.