Bloodthirst (3 page)

“But it's standard procedure” McCoy began to protest indignantly. Behind him, Stanger had overheard and muttered what McCoy assumed was an obscenity.

“You don't have to tell
me
, Doctor,” Kirk said dryly. “What interests me is that there is no explanation as to
why
we should not respond.”

The thought did not strike McCoy as a pleasant one. “Did you tell them we're already down here?”

“Not yet. But if there's nothing you can do down there, we may as well go ahead and beam you up. I don't want you exposed to any unnecessary danger”

“I'd just as soon not be exposed to
necessary
danger, either, if it's all the same to you.”

Stanger interrupted, flashlight down, his eyes fastened on the glowing tricorder. “Doctor, I'm getting another faint life-form reading.…”

McCoy sighed. “Jim, someone else is down here. I just lost one person by a few seconds, and though I'd just as soon get out of here, I think we ought to stay a bit longer and see if there's something we can do.” He and Stanger exchanged unhappy glances; it was clear that the security guard was just as displeased to have a reason to stay longer.

There was a second's pause, and then Kirk said, “All right. I suppose we can't disobey the order more than we already have.”

“That's the spirit. I'll check back in if there's any problem. McCoy out.” He snapped the communicator shut and looked up at Stanger. “Where's the reading coming from?”

Stanger nodded at the door just as it slid open in the dark. There was an instant of confusion before he got the flashlight aimed at the intruder's face.

The man in the doorway threw pale arms up to protect his face. “The light! Please, the light!”

There was honest agony in his voice. Stanger lowered the flashlight. “Who are you?”

Even the presence of the light near his feet seemed to dismay the man. Still shielding his face with his hands, he squinted at the others in obvious discomfort.

McCoy gave a small, involuntary shudder at the sight of the man's face. Maybe it was an illusion created by the shadows, but the man's skin was gray, the expression pinched—like a corpse, McCoy thought, like a med school cadaver that'd been taken out of stasis and left lying around the classroom too long.

“Adams. Jeff Adams.” He did not move closer. The light at his feet kept him pinned in the doorway, unable to come any nearer, but drawn to Stanger and McCoy by some need. “I'm not used to the light anymore—it's been shut off for days.”

“Mr. Adams” McCoy began.

“Dr. Adams.”

Good Lord, did titles matter at a time like this? “Dr. Adams, then, can you tell us what's going on here? We intercepted an emergency signal”

“I broadcasted that signal, yes. Thank God you're here.” Although Adams' face was shadowed, it looked like the man was making an effort to smile.

“How many of you are there?”

“Three. Three of us.”

Stanger aimed the beam on the faces of the dead. “Then would you mind explaining
this?”

Neither of them made it to Adams in time before he fell.

Jim Kirk felt a headache coming on. At first he attributed it to the cumulative effect of several days' unrelenting boredom on a stellar mapping assignment. Such tasks invariably left the captain with nothing to do but fidget, so Kirk had jumped at the chance to respond to a distress signal. But the more he listened to what McCoy had to say, the less thrilled he was that the
Enterprise
had answered the call, and the more his head throbbed. He took a generous mouthful of chicken salad on rye, in the hopes that it would somehow help.

“Here's the thing that bothers me.” McCoy leaned forward over an untouched plate of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Normally, such a meeting would have taken place in sickbay or the captain's quarters, until McCoy put up a fuss about missing lunch and it already being past dinnertime. Which was no problem, except that McCoy had simply stared at his plate for the first five minutes.

Kirk finished swallowing. “You mean only
one
thing about this bothers you?”

“All right, then, the thing that bothers me the
most
about all this is—what happened to all the blood?”

“Please elaborate, Doctor.” Spock sat opposite McCoy and next to the captain with his fingers steepled, having already silently and efficiently disposed of an unconscionably large salad.

“There just simply wasn't enough blood left in the corpses”

Kirk had just taken another huge bite of his sandwich; he stopped chewing. He wasn't particularly squeamish by nature, but with the headache

“Forgive me, but I believe you mentioned that the throats of both victims had been slit,” Spock said calmly. “Isn't it logical for significant blood loss to occur?”

“Yes, but Stanger and I examined the area around the bodies—with a flashlight, mind you; kind of spooky down there, in the dark—before we moved them, and there wasn't as much blood as there should have been. Yoshi—that's the man, Adams says—was face down with his carotid slit. Do you have any idea how fast blood would drain from a body under those circumstances?”

“Approximately” Spock began. Kirk looked up from his cup of coffee in dismay, but McCoy came to the rescue.

“Chrissake, man, when are you going to learn to recognize a rhetorical question? Suffice it to say that there would have been enough blood to swim in.”

“Doctor.” Kirk set down his mug.

“At least to go wading,” McCoy persisted.

“Do you
mind?”

McCoy caught the look on the captain's face and a sheepish grin slowly crossed his face. “Sorry about that, Jim.” His expression grew more serious. “But there are at the very least three or four liters total of blood unaccounted for, particularly in Lara Krovozhadny's—the woman's—case. She hardly had a drop on her—of her own blood, that is. Most of what was on her belonged to Yoshi.”

Kirk looked disconsolately at his half-eaten sandwich. “Any ideas as to why that is?”

McCoy shook his head.

“Obviously, someone removed it,” said Spock.

McCoy eyed him with disgust and brutally thrust a fork and knife into his chicken. “Well now, that thought occurred to me, too, Spock. But who would want to steal blood? Our friend Adams?”

“He
is
a likely suspect.”

“Our only living one, actually. And, intriguingly enough, he's severely anemic. I've had to give him a massive transfusion.” McCoy's expression became thoughtful as he speared a piece of chicken and chewed it. “It's a weird bug he has. I've never seen anything like it—and frankly, I have the gut feeling it's been genetically engineered. Stop rolling your eyes, Spock. The lab's running tests on it now. At first I thought his symptoms indicated porphyria, but they're not quite right.”

Kirk frowned. “That's a new one on me. Por—what?”

“Porphyria. I doubt you've heard of it before. Of course, I'm sure Spock has”

“Porphyria,” Spock recited. “A genetic mutation affecting the production of enzymes required for the synthesis of heme”

“Thanks, Spock, but that wasn't an invitation to lecture.” McCoy shook his head and turned back to the captain. “Anyway, like Spock said, porphyria is caused by a genetic mutation, not an organism. An interesting disease, though. Explains how stories of vampires and werewolves got started. A person with porphyria is sensitive to light—so sensitive that it can literally burn holes in the skin.”

“Vampires?” Kirk frowned. “I thought that was a sort of bat that lived in South America.”

“I'll bet your mother never told you about Santa Claus, either,” McCoy retorted.

The Vulcan explained. “A vampire is indeed a South American bat, but the term also refers to a legendary creature—a human who each night leaves the grave to feed on the blood of the living, employing similar methods to the vampire bat. At sunrise, the vampire must return to its crypt, or be destroyed by the light. Its victims in turn become vampires themselves.” He paused. “Would you also like to know about Santa Claus?”

McCoy groaned audibly.

“No thanks. I appreciate the folklore lesson,” Kirk said impatiently, “but what does this have to do with Adams?”

“He suffers from many of the same symptoms,” McCoy answered. “Such as photosensitivity. The photochemical reaction of light on his skin literally burns holes in him—he has a number of lesions. The presence of light is excruciatingly painful for him. If exposed long enough, he would die. A porphyria victim is also extremely anemic—which Adams definitely is—and the disease makes the gums recede from the teeth. But Adams' disease seems to be much more insidious. I'm running some tests now to see what we can do to help his body produce its own heme—because if the anemia worsens as its present rate, we'll be giving him a liter of whole blood every five minutes.”

“What about his mental state?” Kirk asked.

“You mean is he capable of killing the others? I don't know, Jim, I really don't. He seems lucid one minute, disoriented the next, but I can't really say he seems violent. Of course, slitting one's throat is hardly a preferred method of suicide.”

“Regardless, I'm going to question him,” said Kirk. “This whole situation on Tanis smells too fishy.”

“I don't deny that.” McCoy put down the fork and knife. “What exactly
are
they doing on Tanis? What's the official word?”

“No official word at all,” Kirk said. “I've advised them of the situation and I'm waiting to hear back, that's all. They aren't telling much of anything.”

“The planet is charted, but listed as uninhabited. There are no records of a base being constructed,” Spock said. “Yet the fact that a hidden underground laboratory facility exists indicates one of two things: either Starfleet purposely intended the facility's location to remain secret—which would explain why we were instructed to avoid contact with it, medical emergency notwithstanding—or the base was built without Starfleet's knowledge. Considering our orders, the first explanation is the most logical. Most probably, the base was built in order to do secret research.”

“The question is, what type of research?” McCoy said. “They've got some sort of microbiological facility down there. And the fact that our boy Adams is infected with some type of bug that the computer is unable to catalog makes me very uneasy. Soon as I came up, I put Stanger and myself through decontam. Ran some blood tests, too. Both of us negative, fortunately.”

“What's your point?” Kirk asked.

“My point is that Tanis is set up for work with microbes.

Disease-causing organisms. I asked Adams what they were doing down there, and he handed me some cow patty about agricultural research—plant diseases and the like. But Tanis is a sterile, practically atmosphereless planet. Nothing grows on its surface, and I didn't see them cultivating anything for testing purposes in the underground facility. And the containment procedures they're using strike me as being awfully elaborate for plant diseases on a planet that couldn't grow mushrooms in the dark.”

Kirk frowned. “Would they be working on cures for diseases?”

McCoy shook his head vehemently. “Adams is infected with something so new, so unheard-of, that the computer can't even classify it, much less diagnose it. And explain to me why Starfleet would want to keep disease research a secret? That's public domain. Any news of a breakthrough is good news.”

“Microbial warfare,” Spock said softly. It was addressed to no one in particular.

“Exactly,” said McCoy, apparently so intrigued by the subject at hand that he failed to realize he had just agreed with his adversary. “I'll bet you credits to doughnuts they're creating bioweapons down there, Jim.”

Kirk shot an angry glance at each of them. “The Federation outlawed that a hundred years ago. And Starfleet Intelligence is answerable to the Council. If that's what they're doing, they're not working for Starfleet.”

“The equipment I saw down there sure looked suspiciously Fleet issue.”

“That doesn't mean anything,” Kirk said. “Before you start making accusations, Doctor, let's wait until Spock takes a look at their records.”

“Have it your way, Jim, but I think you're being awfully fair. It still doesn't explain why we were told not to respond to their distress call.” McCoy gave a careless shrug and stabbed his chicken. “It's as simple as that.”

“I don't know the explanation,” Kirk said shortly. “But I intend to find out.” He rubbed his temples and wondered why McCoy's statement made him feel so damned defensive.

Maybe it was because of the sinking feeling that the doctor was right.

Adams looked like a walking corpse.

Kirk repressed a shudder. Adams lay on a diagnostic bed inside the pitch-black isolation chamber while the captain stood outside. It was small comfort that the sick man probably could not see him, was probably blinded even by the dimmed light outside the chamber. Kirk could see Adams perfectly well, thanks to the infrared visor McCoy had given him, although at the moment, he wasn't sure that constituted an advantage. The man's face was a death mask: pale skin stretched tight over jutting cheekbones, sunken eyes glittering above dark circles. He looked thin and wasted, as if he had been ill for months instead of the week or so McCoy suggested. The deep gray tones of infrared only added to the ghoulish effect. Kirk was uncomfortably reminded of Spock's vampire legend.

He reached out and pressed the intercom. At the sound of it, Adams struggled as if trying to get to his feet.

“Don't get up.” Kirk gestured for him to sit, before he remembered that he was invisible.

The man squinted in Kirk's general direction. Around Adams' scrawny, corded neck was a chain, and he clutched the locket in his palm as if trying to draw strength from it. “Jeff Adams,” he answered. The voice was warm and affable, the antithesis of shadow. Kirk found that he was smiling, and attempted to counter the effect by reminding himself that the man was quite likely a murderer, and even if not, at the very least was working on something the Federation looked on with revulsion.