Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic (7 page)

Therian turned on him, teeth bared. “No!” he cried. “You traitor—
twice
you have desecrated the purity of species as the Great Mother made us! No
more!
No more!”

“Therian—it’s the plague,” Korsal said softly, backing away from the Andorian’s fury. He held his
hands up, palms open, hoping Therian would recog
nize that he was not attacking. “You’re ill, Therian.
Let me call—”

“Laskodor!”
Therian raged. “Seducer of the Daugh
ter! Destroyer of the Children!”

The room was monitored for sound level—Korsal
didn’t have to shout for assistance; Therian’s shouts
already had orderlies on the way. He could hear their
running steps in the hallway, but Therian was leaping
for his throat!

The Andorian had far less strength than a Klingon,
but the rage of madness gave extra power to Therian’s slender body. Trying not to injure him, Korsal pushed
him away, but the thin arms snaked out to grasp his
throat.

Korsal fought, bending Therian’s fingers back—but
Andorian joints bent naturally that way! He would
black out in a moment! Where were those orderlies?!

Getting his elbows under Therian’s arms, Korsal broke the Andorian’s hold, flinging him backward
against two orderlies in contamination gear charging
in at the door.

Therian bounced off them, shrieked wordlessly, and
lunged for Korsal again.

The Klingon caught him by the arms and started to
turn him toward the orderlies when the Andorian
went limp. “He’s passed out,” he said, lifting the light form and laying it down on Therian’s bed. “Better get a gurney.”

One of the orderlies left, but the other switched on
the life-function display over the bed. None of the
indicators moved, except the one for body tempera
ture. It rose, but then began to drift slowly downward.

“He’s dead,” said the orderly, his voice muffled by
his suit.

“He can’t be!” Korsal exclaimed. “Call for life
support! No, I will—you resuscitate him!”

“Sir,” the orderly said, “he was Andorian. He cannot be resuscitated.”

Korsal had never known whether that was a fact of
Andorian biology or one of their religious tenets.
Either way, there was nothing he could do; Therian
was gone.

He sat dejectedly on his own bed as the orderlies
removed the body.

Gone. And his knowledge with him.

Or had it been only the madness?

Korsal stared at Therian’s computer screen, where
the lines of data still crawled obediently upward and
disappeared. Whatever the epidemiologist saw had long since scrolled by, and Korsal had no way of
determining which lines to call back.

Was it just the madness that made Therian think he
had found the answer? Or to his statistician’s mind
had the screen actually given a clue to the mutation of
the plague—a clue that somehow involved the chil
dren of Nisus?

Chapter Six

Sorel’s patients were right on time. Physically, both
T’Kar and T’Pina were in perfect health.

“Are you certain it is wise to return to Nisus now?”
Sorel asked the two women. “You have no family there—”

“It is home,” T’Kar replied serenely. Had he
allowed himself such an emotion, Sorel could have
envied her serenity. T’Kar had returned to Vulcan two months ago, to return her husband’s
katra
to his
ancestors, as was the Vulcan way.

“Nisus is the only home I can remember,” T’Pina
added. “Now that I have completed my education, I
am eager to begin working.”

“But you will expose yourselves needlessly to a deadly disease,” Sorel reminded them. “Surely the
epidemic will be under control by the time the next
transport is available.”

“I am a nurse,” T’Kar replied. “Nurses are desper
ately needed. You have not refused Nisus’ call for aid,
Healer.”

“So that information is already public,” he com
mented.

“Sorn told me,” replied T’Pina. “He also wished to
persuade me not to go home.”

“Sorn would wish T’Pina not to return to Nisus at
all,” said her mother, “but his family has not contacted me.”

Sorel caught the unspoken warning to the younger
woman. He did not know Sorn, but he gathered that the young man must come from one of the Vulcan
families who took great care about what families they
married into.

T’Kar and her husband came from Ancient Families—those who could trace their ancestry back
to original followers of the philosopher Surak.

Their daughter, however, was adopted.

T’Pina had been one of twenty-four children who
were the only survivors of an attack on Vulcan Colony
Five. No one lived on Vulcan Colony Five today, for
Vulcan had other colony worlds farther from the
Romulan Neutral Zone.

It was assumed Romulans had destroyed the colo
ny, which had been there just a few years and was only
seven hundred strong, but there was no way to prove it. So far was the colony from the regular space lanes
that their call for help had reached Starfleet more than
a day after the attack. By the time a starship got there,
nothing was left but devastation, and twenty-four
children under the age of three.

All adults and older children were dead, all buildings destroyed, and all records along with them. The
other children were identified by retinal scans, but one infant girl was only days old, her birth as yet
unrecorded. None of the other children could tell who
her parents were, and so no one knew what Vulcan
family she belonged to.

T’Kar and Sevel did not care. Having no children of
their own, they joyfully adopted the little girl and
took her with them to Nisus. She grew up bright and
healthy, earning her own place on Nisus by placing
first in her class at the Vulcan Academy of Sciences.

All of that was in T’Pina’s medical records. What the records did not show was the young woman’s
serenity, so much like her mother’s. There might be
no blood kinship between them, but the bonds be
tween mother and daughter were stronger than those
between many “natural” parents and children.

Sorel found judgment according to bloodlines rath
er than accomplishment incomprehensible. Few Vulcans were unable to rejoice in people’s differences, as
Surak taught. Unfortunately, those few could do great
damage. He remembered Sendet actually attempting
to disrupt the bonding between Daniel and T’Mir,
and recalled for the first time that the young man was
aboard the
Enterprise.
He hoped Captain Kirk was transporting Sendet and all his kind in the brig!

Suppressing that unworthy thought, Sorel returned
to the subject of Nisus. “Daniel and I have been requested—but we have experience at treating not
only Vulcans and Humans, but many other intelligent
species here at the Academy.”

“Our friends are on Nisus,” said T’Kar. “We cannot stay here when every hand is needed to care for
the sick—even to keep the power plant and the fields
attended!”

T’Pina added, “Healer, Nisus’ self-sufficiency could
be destroyed. Or the colony could die—for the want of one pair of willing hands.”

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” Sorel said
without thinking.

T’Kar looked at him curiously, but T’Pina nodded.
“For want of the shoe, the horse was lost. It is an
Earth saying, Mother. I learned it from some Humans
here at the Academy.”

“And I learned it from Daniel Corrigan,” said Sorel. “The point is the ultimate consequences of
apparently trivial events: eventually the kingdom is
lost because of a nail—a small, nearly worthless item.
But people are not small or worthless, T’Pina.”

“Exactly why we must not let any more be lost.”

“I agree,” added T’Kar. “Healer, logic does not
apply. There is no way to know whether our return to
Nisus will mean enough help to conquer the plague, or our own deaths. We understand that the disease is
increasingly contagious, but Nisus is taking stringent
precautions to prevent its spread. To save our home
and our friends, we will accept the risk.”

“Then I will make no further attempt to dissuade you,” said Sorel, admiring their courage. “T’Par is waiting to do the final test of your psychological
healing.”

T’Kar’s Eyebrows rose. “Not you, Healer?”

So—she did not know. Possibly T’Pina did; those who knew how the stasis chambers worked might deduce that only time could heal Sorel’s broken
bonding.

“I bear the same wound from which you are recov
ering,” he said flatly. “However, my wife was taken
from me unexpectedly, our bonding torn asunder. I
could not return her
katra
to her ancestors.”

T’Kar paled visibly, but the cause was certainly
sufficient. Although she had completed the mourning
cycle, and Sorel was certain T’Par would find her healed, she understood as her unbonded daughter
could not.

Sorel’s was a wound from which some Vulcans
never recovered; sometimes he had to force himself to
maintain his body from day to day, his only sense of
purpose in his work. He reminded himself that T’Zan
would insist that he go on, but it became harder every
day. He poured all his energies into his routine at the
hospital, resisting going home to the empty house
they had once shared.

The mission to Nisus was welcome to Sorel. After
T’Zan’s death, Leonard McCoy had suggested he leave Vulcan for a time, but he had had no reason then. He did not want T’Kar going to Nisus for the
same reason he was—to feel that his life was worth
something, even if he died for it.

To his shock, he saw in her eyes that T’Kar under
stood his motives. She had blue eyes, rare among
Vulcans, hard to conceal emotions in. Sorel had been
told that his own black eyes were unreadable—yet T’Kar, who hardly knew him, had discerned his
feelings as easily as Daniel did. But his associate had
known him for forty years and, being Human, was
always alert for signs of emotion.

He saw sympathy in T’Kar’s eyes. Then she looked
down, her lashes concealing the inadvertent ex
change. “We understand, Healer,” she said formally,
“and grieve with thee. Come, T’Pina.
T’Par
will be
waiting.”