Act 7
Captain Traz stood in the sickbay as Z'org paced the small space. Doctor T'Lal was trying her best to get the large lizard to sit down, but she was having little luck. He easily towered over her by .45 meters. His tail agitatedly thrashed back and forth, knocking against saudered down beds and the walls of the small sickbay. Red blood had congealed in three spots where he had received new scars. One across his elongated muzzle, and two along his left arm.
"They had lain in wait for usss," he hissed angrily, turning as he came to the right side of the sickbay. "Commander Enviro wasss in the lead. He and that big-eyed flesh sssack who called himssself Mizzzzier were arguing about sssomething. Thisss one doesss not remember what about. Thisss one wasss busssy keeping thisss onesss crewmembersss together and alert. Next thing thisss one knew, a flash of bright light ssstunned usss. Thisss one wasss ssspared becaussse of the inner eyelid of the Gorn. But thisss one wasss unable to rally our officccersss to ssstop the Commander and Crewman Zekstra from being abducted."
"Sit down, Z'org," T'Lal said, trying to grab him. He angrily threw off her hand. "I can't treat you if you don't stop moving."
"Thisss one will carry the ssscar to remember the priccce of thisss onesss failure," he said mournfully.
"Lieutenant Commander," she said sternly, yet not unkind. "Did you do your best? If your team had not been stunned, would you have tried to retrieve those two officers?" Okay, one wasn't an officer. She was only a crewman, but that wasn't the point. "Would you have kept them out of harm's way?"
"To the bessst of thisss onesss ability," he said, slowing his steps a little as he hesitated. The Vulcan doctor at once began to wave the dermal regeneration scanner over the lower of the two long cuts. Yellow beams crisscrossed this arm and had Traz paid attention, she could have seen the pinkish meat underneath the green scales begin to worm toward each other.
"Then you did not fail," she said. "As long as you did your best, you have not failed. Were you able to tag any of the abductors?"
"Thisss one thinksss he phasssered the shoulder of one of the terrorrissstsss," Z'org shrugged. The motion pulled the recently started healing muscles out of the way of the Vulcan Doctor.
T'Lal grunted in something that one might have mistaken as impatience and reaching up, clenched him near the shoulder. At once the raptor began to grow weak, his legs beginning to tremble. Traz had never seen a Vulcan Death Pinch being used on a non-human. Z'org did not pass out. Insteed, two nurses had to rush over to him to help him stagger/drag himself to a bio-bed.
"Now that you are sitting down," she said in something very akin to sarcasm. "I can fix your scars."
There was so much she wanted to say and do. Even as she stood there, watching the Doctor work, she knew that there wasn't anything she could do. She would try to get back her first officer, but she had other things she had to attend to as well. Part of the antu-terrorist operations she had going was having Sele and his Engineering teams building a sensor net around the areas where the medical research and medicine was being produced. It was strong enough now that at most of the thirteen different sites, anyone could be scanned above and below ground with a kilometer to spare.
"Have you been able to get any further on the cure?" Traz asked at last.
"Not much more then when we last spoke," T'Lal answered, moving the skin regenerator up to the scar across the muzzle. Z'org's head bobbed slightly, his thick pink tongue lolled out in a stupor. Yet not enough that she couldn't do her work. "Frankly Captain, there is no logical need to rush this. If after two years they haven't discovered a cure, it is highly unlikely we would get closer to a solution in a much shorter time."
That Vulcan cool logic. Lillian couldn't help the small smile that tugged at her lips. She turned and headed out of the sick bay, knowing that hovering over T'Lal's shoulder wouldn't endear her to the Vulcan. She exited, to find the Deputy Protector, a young woman with not so much larger but instead longer eyes, standing with a dark purple suit dress.
"I am sorry for what happened down on the planet," she said, and fell into step behind the Captain. The Captain wasn't exactly in the mood to just stand around. She had to go do….something. Anything! "They don't take too many hostages."
"And what about the times they have taken hostages?" Lillian asked. "What have they done with them?"
The Deputy Protector squirmed uncomfortably as they headed to the turbolift. "We don't have a policy for getting hostages back," she admitted as the doors whooshed open for them. "We haven't had any real need for it, as it's almost nonexistent. We had no kidnappings or hostage situations the first two hundred years of our settlement, which was settled at the time the Federation was founded. After that, the last one hundred years, two kidnapping. And that was it."
"Bridge," Traz called to the computer as the doors shut. She felt the turbolift began to move, felt the slight shift in gravity as the turbolift began its ascent. "So what happens then with the captives?"
"They make no demands, these terrorists," the other woman said. "Nor do we have a way to communicate with them."
"Wait…." Traz said, frowning at the older woman. "You are telling me that for two years you've had these terrorist acts and yet you can't communicate with these terrorists? So again I ask, what happens to the captives then?"
The older woman shrugged. There was a feeling that the older woman was holding out on Traz. As if she wasn't being completely honest with her. It was really annoying Traz to no end. Was the real reason they were called her was simply because the Japorrians were incapable of actually doing anything themselves? They really had never tried reaching out to them?
"The only time we actually tried to open communications with them was shortly after the terrorist activity began," the Deputy said. The turbolift came to a gradual stop and the door slid open. Traz stepped out, with the Deputy following behind her. "We sent our Medical Director to try to explain to them what was going on. Three days later, Director Menare was killed, having been tortured by the terrorists. Trust me, these people can't be reasoned with."
"Wakey, wakey," the Japorrian said, kneeling by the bound captives. "No more sleepy time."
James glared at the terrorist. The man had all the looks of an earth pirate about him. He wore a silver bandana, his face was covered in enough stubble that a horse could walk through it unseen, and he actually had an eyepatch over his left eye, scars running up and down from where the patch covered. He wore a sleeveless vest that did nothing to hide his muscular arms or the scars from both plasma burns and cuts.
"We weren't sleeping, you dolt!" James snapped. He knew that antagonizing their captors wasn't the best thing to do, but he believed that showing fear was the last thing they wanted to do.
"Good," the man gave a broken toothed grin. "Then you won't mind a visitor."
"Do we have a choice?" James remarked snidely.
"Of course," another man said. "All men have choices. It's what we do with the choices is what matters."
A man just shy of two meters stepped out from behind a group of six terrorists that had been watching them. They were underground, in what seemed to be a cave. Much of the cave was interlaced with columns of natural stone and it was between two such pillars that the man stepped through.
There was nothing….cruel about the man. James looked at him, eyed the man and saw much of what he felt was a parental air about him.
"Are you the leader here?" Enviro asked, not letting up his glare.
"One could say that I am," the man said. He stopped just a foot out of reach of James' boot, had the other decided to kick him. "I'm merely a humble servant of the people."
"A servant who destroys the very thing keeping them alive?" James asked incredulously.
The man chuckled. "You got it all wrong, Commander….that is what the rank is correct? I'm not so good with Federation ranks. It's much easier with our own Japorri ones. Minor Prefect, Little Prefect, Middle Prefect, Upper Prefect, Superior Prefect. It might have a feeling of repetitiveness, but it's not hard to remember."
The man turned to Crewman Zekstra and frowned. He got closer to the young woman, who was sitting with her own scowl. He squatted close to her and stared at her, his eyes roving over her features.
"Forgive me, but I am not familiar with your race," he finally said. "You have pointed ears like a Vulcan but your brow is too pronounced. What else are you?"
Zekstra turned her eyes to James, looking for a directive. Seeing as there was no harm to it, the Commander inclined his head. There wouldn't be any harm in it.
"I'm half-Vulcan, half-Romulan," she finally said, turning her scowl back to the terrorist leader.
The man's face brightened. "Ah yes!" he said, clapping his hands together. "I see the Romulan in the stink-eye you're giving me. I once operated on Romulan male during the Dominion War. His ship had crash landed in the Zebr Forest. Although, his brow was all smashed to pieces, which I assume is the prominent Romulan feature in you, my dear. I'm afraid I had no idea how it was supposed to look. That might be why the man gave me such a nasty glare after we revived him from surgery."
James frowned at what the man was saying. If what he was saying is true, then this man had no right being here! "You are a doctor?" he asked.
"The term we use is Healther," the man said.
"Then why are you keeping medicine from the people suffering from Plague?" the Commander demanded. "Is it not your job to preserve life?"
"That's what we are doing," the Healther said, standing so he was towering over the two.
"Destroying medicine?" Zekstra asked snidely. "Destroy the help keeps the needing fixed? Is that it?"
"It's not that…"
"Come on man!" Enviro nearly shouted. "How can you justify what you are doing?"
"Because the medicine is the Plague!" the man snapped, looking hard at Enviro. The two Starfleet officers fell silent, and glanced at each other. "Yes, the medicine is a form of ethnic cleansing. The Japorri Government has decided to eliminate a third of the population to cut back on the demands of food growth and other things."
"Impossible!" Enviro shook his head. "Our doctors are very good and they would have detected something was wrong with it. Heck, I even looked at the research our Doctor was doing into it and I didn't see anything wrong with it!"
"That's the beauty of it!" the Healther said in a horrified excitement. He got on one knee before the Commander and held up his index and thumb. "The inoculations single out the individual cells that disease resides in. In every living being, there are parts of the DNA that have tiny traces of life-threatening diseases that the person themselves has either had or is part of the family history. If your great grandparent had cancer, there remains a very tiny strain of it in the DNA. The inoculation hunts these trace-markers of the diseases."
"The medicine would purge it of that," Zekstra said, unable to hold her silence. "Look, I'm no doctor or anything, but even I know that."
The Healther laughed. "Oh my child," he shook his head. "The medicine is actually a…..changeling. That's the best word to describe it. Upon entering the bloodstream, it reads the information gathered by the inoculations, then changes into the disease."
That was….actually pretty ingenious. Oh, to be sure, the Commander felt that it was on the level of mad scientist genius. But there was no way that that could be true. The ability for medicine to change into a disease simply wasn't possible. Not even 24th Century medicine had ever achieved that.
"You're lying," James said, "It simple is impossible."
"No, it's very much possible," the man said with a shudder. "And it's real. Infact, the Plague only becomes active in areas that have been visited by the Healthers with the medicine and inoculations. One point five million are already dead because of it."
"And how would you know it could do this?" James asked.
The man closed his eyes and put a hand to it. He took deep breaths, shuddering like a man who has a terrible secret. Something that was tearing him apart. Sometimes Enviro saw that same look in his own eyes when he looked in the mirror during unguarded moments. Guilt, whether it was warranted or not.
"Because I created it," he said, his voice soft and so very tired. "I created both the first generations of the inoculations and the first generation medicine. Every death is my fault."
