“Does he know yet?” Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux asked, staring through the plexiglass at their head of astrophysics and exotic sciences.

“The results, no,” Dr. James Henderson replied. “But I’m sure he can infer by the fact we’re out here and he’s in there.” 

If Dr. Lockwood had been negative, they would have just come in and told him. But they hadn’t. He was positive, and that meant he’d only know those four walls for the remainder of his days. Unless they found a cure. They needed to find a cure. The clock was ticking, the disease progressed quickly, and the body bags were already starting to pile up on Archanis Station.

“What about the ensign?” Captain Devreux asked. Snarr Vok, the young theoretician from Dr. Lockwood’s lab, had gone to the symposium with his boss, and he too had been in close proximity to the propulsion researcher from the Advanced Starship Design Bureau.

“Unfortunately, he tested positive too,” Dr. Henderson confirmed. “It’s progressing slower with him though, I assume because of his physiology.” There was so much they didn’t know about the Dominion-built bioweapon that’d just resurfaced on Archanis Station after nearly three decades of dormancy.

“Every update from Archanis Station is painful,” Captain Devreux sighed. “But when it’s our own, someone we see every day, it just makes it hurt so much more.” Dr. Lockwood could be a pain in the ass, but he was their pain in the ass, the one who’d made the first breakthrough with the aberrant singularity over Vespara, and the one who’d traced the beacon from Wolf 359 back to Beta Serpentis, among so many others.

“It does,” Dr. Henderson agreed, a dark shadow cast across his face. He’d seen far too much death over his decades in the service of life, but the last year had been particularly bad, rivaling even those wretched years at the height of the Dominion War. “It never gets easier either.”

Captain Devreux, the lifelong explorer, had spent most of his career beyond the reach of the galactic conflicts that his colleagues had faced, but now it had caught up with him. In the past year, he’d seen enough death for a lifetime. 

For a moment, the two just stood there in mournful silence.

But they couldn’t just stand there feeling sorry for themselves. The battle was still raging, and they needed to act. “Did you see Captain Vale’s latest update?” Dr. Henderson prompted.

“No. I saw it come across the wire, but I’ve been a bit busy,” Captain Devreux admitted. The dispatch from Archanis Station’s Director of Medical Services had arrived almost immediately after he’d ordered the ship into lockdown, but even with all the prep work they’d done ahead of time, there’d still been so much to sort out once it went in place. “How bad has it gotten?”

“As of 1900 hours, they’re up to four hundred and eighty.”

“Four hundred and eighty?! How?! They were at only two hundred and fifty this morning…” the captain stammered. And then he realized the lunacy of his word choice. Only two hundred and fifty, he’d said. Had he really just minimized it like that? That was two hundred and fifty souls, and now four hundred and eighty, that would be dead unless they could find a cure. They needed to find a cure. “How the hell did it take off so fast?”

“Estimates from the last time we saw the virus placed its R-nought around ten, and given its virulence, that’s more explosive than it sounds,” Dr. Henderson explained. “Most diseases with such a propagation factor don’t kill the host within a week.” And that was what really worried him, moreso even than his colleague dying on the other side of the glass. If this thing got rolling, it wouldn’t be these two he’d be worried about. It would be some significant portion of the nearly two thousand that called this ship home. “Have you heard from Titus yet?”

“Yes, our new chief is a pro,” Captain Devreux replied, acknowledging Captain Titus Bishop, the new Chief Security and Tactical Officer of the USS Polaris who he’d tasked with contact tracing. “Within twenty minutes, he had all identified persons isolated and confined to quarters.”

“How many?” Dr. Henderson asked. He was acutely aware that the larger the number was, the more likely it would be that someone had slipped through the cracks. And within the confines of this starship, if someone slipped through the craps, that’d mean a great many deaths.

“Thankfully, Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok are as introverted as they come,” Captain Devreux chuckled. The fact that the theorists mostly kept to their lab was about the only good news he had today. “In total, Captain Bishop identified only around three dozen.” 

Dr. Henderson looked skeptical. “That includes second degree contacts too?” They were three days late with Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok, and that meant not only a cohort of directly infected people, but with a forty eight hour incubation period before infectiousness, that cohort could have already gone on to infect another cohort beyond them.

“Yes, including second degree contacts,” Captain Devreux confirmed. “I guess Dr. Lockwood has been completely holed up, taking no visitors and going nowhere besides his office and his quarters. He’s working through some new theorem in temporal chromodynamics. Ensign Vok, meanwhile, took his weekend alone on the holodeck, enjoying a recreation on Sauria. The first degree cohort was pretty much just the shuttle pilot, a couple from the lab, and the poor soul that got assigned to clean Lockwood’s office yesterday.”

Dr. Henderson let out a sigh of relief. If he was honest with himself, as sorry as it was to think this way, there really were no two better than Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok to have come into contact with the disease. Anyone else would have gone on to infect far more. He could only imagine if it had been a different member of the command staff, or someone that worked in a crowded area like main engineering or the bridge.

“You think we got a cap on this?” Captain Devreux asked hopefully. He needed some assurance. He wasn’t ready to see his ship turned into a morgue.

“Only time will tell,” Dr. Henderson cautioned. He wanted to be optimistic, but he knew better when it came to this, a contagion that’d been designed by its creators to end entire worlds. “You know this will be the last time you and I will be able to stand face-to-face until this is all over, right?” He hadn’t even liked that the captain had come down this time, but at least he hadn’t been in contact with Dr. Lockwood or Ensign Vok yet. That wouldn’t be the case much longer.

Captain Devreux furled his brow. He didn’t like what the doctor was intimating.

“I can’t send my people in there without going in myself,” Dr. Henderson elaborated. “And the moment I go in there, I become a threat. I can’t risk infecting you and the rest of the command staff.” Even with biocontainment suits and strict protocols, it was always possible the contagion could break through. He’d seen it happen during the War, forced to watch as several of his fellow first responders became victims themselves. None of them had survived.

“James, your staff can tend to Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok,” Captain Devreux shook his head. “We need you alive and in good health if we’re going to find a cure.”

“It’s just out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Henderson tried to assure the captain. “And I can do both. We have only two patients to tend to. There’ll still be plenty of time to work on the cure, but I need to lead from the front with my team.” And that meant going in there.

Captain Devreux didn’t like the idea, and his expression said as much.

“Gérard, I’m about to ask my staff to risk their lives for these two men,” Dr. Henderson replied with deep conviction. “I won’t ask them to do what we are unwilling to have me do, nor will I stay at arm’s length from those who are in my care simply out of fear for my own life.” It’d been hard enough to stay aboard Polaris when cases began flooding Archanis Station, but to shirk away when it was his own shipmates in there? He couldn’t do that.

Captain Devreux wanted to argue, but the look on the doctor’s face told him that it would be futile. Even if he made it an order, Dr. Henderson’s convictions were too strong. “Very well,” the captain conceded, wondering inwardly if he’d consented to allowing the doctor to sign his own death warrant unless they found a cure. “Any progress on finding a way out of this thing?”

“The virological vector is both biologically and technically sophisticated, engineered to evade our attempts to stop it through the rapid rate at which it mutates once it infects a host,” Dr. Henderson explained. “The most promising line of research so far is Dr. Verhoeven’s work to reverse engineer the vector’s primordial strain, which would allow us to produce a vaccine. But it’s still little more than a theory at this point.” And even a vaccine, he knew, would do nothing for Dr. Lockwood, Ensign Vok, and the others already infected.

“Anything from Starfleet Medical or any of the institutes?” Captain Devreux asked. The doctor, he knew, had been in touch with colleagues across the quadrant.

“The Tri-Planetary Academy passed along some ideas about therapeutics to delay progression, but otherwise, just condolences from those who remember this from the last time and blank stares from those who don’t,” Dr. Henderson sighed. “It’s a shame, after facing this during the War, that no one had the foresight to continue to invest research on it in case it resurfaced again.”

“What about the other governments?”

“The Klingon Empire, which saw it during the War, suggested we do what they did last time,” Dr. Henderson frowned. Their suggestion had been most unhelpful.

“Which was?”

“Load up the infected on a transport and send them to glory in a last stand against the enemy.”

“How very Klingon of them,” Captain Devreux grumbled. That wasn’t Starfleet’s way, and even if it was, they didn’t even know who their enemy was this time. They had made no progress on determining who’d unleashed this plague upon them this time. “What about the Romulans, the Cardassians, or others?”

“Not so much as a response from any other power with the capacity to engineer a cure,” Dr. Henderson replied. “Which means they either don’t know anything, or they’re unwilling to share.”

A depressing thought, however you cut it. Captain Devreux turned back to the glass, looking once more at the physicist on the other side. “What’re you going to tell him?”

“The truth,” Dr. Henderson replied flatly. “Luke Lockwood is an empiricist. He’ll appreciate it factual and straight up.” He’d see right through any sugarcoating too.

“He’s also a problem solver,” Captain Devreux offered as an idea dawned on him. It was a hail mary at best – Dr. Lockwood was a physicist, not a biologist – but what else could they do?

Dr. Henderson tilted his head quizzically. He wasn’t following.

“You have one of the greatest minds of our generation in there, and you’ve said it yourself: it’s engineering is sophisticated, both biologically and technically,” Captain Devreux pointed out. “Enlist Dr. Lockwood in your pursuit. So long as he has the strength, give him a chance to save himself, and maybe he’ll save us all.” 

The quirky astrophysicist had done it before, pulling off a miracle when none thought possible. Maybe he could do it again.