Sonya Gomez sat in the captain’s chair at the center of the da Vinci bridge, her crew around her, standing ready to fill any orders she might issue…and silently felt sorry for herself.

Rarely was she given command of the ship—despite her position as first officer, the separate structures of the ship and S.C.E. crews dictated that one of the bridge officers take the conn when the captain was off duty, leaving her and her engineers free to concentrate on their specialized duties.

Right now, though, David Gold’s skills as a veteran starship captain were in greater demand than any engineering contributions. And, as she had so spectacularly demonstrated earlier, her own diplomatic and people skills didn’t amount to jack.

You can’t blame yourself for Tev’s inability to carry himself like a proper Starfleet officer, she tried to tell herself. That was Tev being Tev. He had shown some improvement of late, though it had taken one of the harshest ass-chewings Sonya had ever had to give to get him there. She really had believed they had turned a corner, and now this…

Gomez stopped, and reexamined the last thought that had just flashed through her mind: believed they had turned a corner. Maybe she was putting too much on Tev, when she should’ve been examining her own shortcomings. After all, Tev had been in Starfleet for close to twenty years. He’d earned his promotions from ensign up to lieutenant commander, and while his record did include more than a few marks, there was nothing that indicated the kind of regular interpersonal conflicts that had marked his tour on the da Vinci. Maybe it was her command style, or her lack of understanding of Tellarite psychology, or something she said when they first met that pissed him off.

Her reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Domenica Corsi on the bridge. “Commander,” she said, frowning. “The captain hasn’t beamed back yet?”

“He’s only been down there half an hour or so,” Gomez said, standing up from the center seat.

“Only half an hour,” the security chief grumbled. “Like nothing can go wrong in so short a time as thirty minutes.” She and the captain had a nice, loud shouting match when he announced that he was going down to meet with the prime ministers, that he was going alone, so as not to create the same negative first impression they had earlier, and that Corsi was not going to stop him.

“He is a grown man, Domenica,” Gomez reminded her. She understood that there were regulations about when a captain should or shouldn’t leave his ship, and that Corsi took those regulations seriously, but there was such a thing as overkill.

Corsi shut her eyes and took a short deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, she looked significantly more composed. “Could I talk to you in the captain’s ready room, then?”

Gomez nodded, and the two stepped off the bridge into the small office. They both took seats in front of Gold’s desk. “Soloman and I met with Minister Latta, and together we compiled a list of fourteen members of the Mariposan scientific community who we determined could pose a future risk to this colony by advanced biological attack. Of those fourteen potential risks, five are dead.”

Gomez dipped her head. “In the bioattack.”

“No,” Corsi said, causing Gomez’s head to snap back up. “That list of fourteen excluded anyone confirmed dead in recent days. These other five deaths all happened nine or more years ago.”

“And their deaths were never officially recorded?”

Corsi shook her head. “They were also, all five, still on file as still being on their jobs. Now, a death certificate doesn’t get filed, that’s an oversight. Five don’t get filed, that’s incompetence. All other official records pointing to them still being alive? That’s a cover-up.”

Gomez’s jaw fell slack. “How could they cover it up up for ten years?”

“There was a huge influx of people here eleven years ago. They start up these rural settlements, and the population starts spreading out from the enclosed complex the Mariposans have concentrated themselves in for two hundred and some years. Not to mention,” Corsi added, with a half grin that conveyed no amusement, “there are dozens of duplicates of these dead women walking around all over the place; how hard is it going to be to miss any specific one?”

Gomez furrowed her brow. “All five were women? That can’t be random chance.”

“No,” Corsi agreed. “It wouldn’t be.”

Gomez studied the security chief’s expression. “You have a theory.”

Corsi nodded slowly. “We managed to track down the families of two of the women. We’re looking for the other three. I don’t want to jump to conclusions before I have more facts…”

“But?”

“But…I’m afraid this colony’s problems could run far deeper than any of us imagined.”

The first thing Gold noticed entering the special ward in the Life Science Center was its peacefulness. The ten patients slept steadily, their faces marred by scabbed-over sores, but nonetheless serene. He’d been in enough sickbays and infirmaries in crisis situations, and he was comfortable saying that the crisis here was passed.

Lense approached from the opposite end of the long room, a young woman he guessed for a medtech tagging along beside her. “It looks like congratulations are in order here, Doctor.”

Allowing herself only a slight smile as she rubbed a finger at the corner of her tired-looking eyes, Lense said, “The battle has been won.”

Gold cocked his head to one side. “But the war?”

Lense took a deep breath, then turned to the Bringloidi woman at her elbow. “Kara, would you run a series ‘A’ blood test from all the patients, and a series ‘B’ from the thirteens, fourteens, and fifteens.” Kara nodded and went to carry out her orders, as Lense turned and led Gold into the small office.

Once they’d both been seated, Lense said, “I’ve isolated and identified the viral agent used against the Mariposans, Captain. It’s rop’ngor.”

Gold’s eyes widened slightly. He recognized the language, of course, but was surprised to hear it spoken in this context. “This is a Klingon bug, you’re telling me?”

“Yes. Or it was. It’s been significantly altered, to the point where it was almost unidentifiable.”

“How would these people get their hands on such an exotic…” The answer dawned on him before he had even finished asking the question. “Ambassador Worf. Of course; he was a lieutenant on the Enterprise at the time.”

But Lense shook her head. “Rop’ngor is a childhood disease; it would’ve been quickly diagnosed and treated in an adult Klingon. But humans can be carriers, and never know. I believe that’s the reason for the violent relapses I’ve been seeing here.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Rop’ngor got its name—it roughly translates as ‘the cheating disease’—because it will attack the body, and then go into a dormant state before antibody production can get up to full strength. That ‘tricks’ the immune system into thinking it’s beaten the thing back. Then, when the white blood cells start dying off, the virus comes out of dormancy, and hits hard, fast, and often.”

“A disease that fights with no honor,” Gold noted. Little wonder the Klingons had given it such a pejorative name.

Lense nodded. “Now, in humans, when they’re first infected, there’s the same trigger for antibody production, just like with any foreign microorganism. But when the virus launches its secondary attack, there are no Klingon proteins for it to feed on. That gives the human autoimmune system plenty of time to counterattack. Except for a mild fever, you’d never even know you were sick.”

“So how does that account for the relapses?” Gold asked.

“Those people who had previously contracted rop’ngor, in its unaltered form, had already built up a resistance to the disease. That let them ‘recover’ from the initial infection by the modified virus.”

“Which was in fact just the virus’s dormant phase,” Gold nodded in understanding. “But now that you know what it is, you have it under control?”

“Not quite,” Lense said through gritted teeth. “I can trigger its dormant stage, but its taking more time to kill it off. The thing is, it’s not rop’ngor anymore. It’s been gen-engineered to target different cell types, mutate their DNA, tie the entire endocrine system in knots….” She sighed and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyelids. “Whoever created this damned thing was one sadistic petaQ.”

Gold considered the top of the doctor’s head in silence for a long moment. “Why don’t you take a break, Lense, now that things are under control?”

The doctor’s head snapped back up immediately. “No. There’s too much more. Too much I don’t know yet.”

Gold sighed softly. “You’re not doing yourself any favors by—”

“Captain,” she cut him off sharply. “I can do this. I have to.”

Since her rescue from the Jabari’s homeworld, Gold had sensed that the doctor had been affected by the ordeal in ways that went beyond what she reported in her debriefing. But she had refused to take any recovery time, and now Gold was worried she was pushing herself too hard, too soon. Yet, he knew from past experience that nothing, short of the ship’s tractor beams at full power, was going to pull this woman away from a medical puzzle she had set her mind to solving.

“All right,” he said, standing up from his side of the desk. “Good work, Doctor.” Maybe once they wrapped things up here, he would “suggest” they resume their informal weekly counseling sessions. He could only pray she didn’t push herself past the breaking point before then.

Wilson Granger stood in the middle of the small one-room structure that had, long ago, been the first shelter built on Mariposa. His hands were solemnly folded in front of him as he read the names etched on the two hundred and eighty-nine individual gold-plate plaques bolted to the four walls, honoring the men and women who had not survived the landing of the S.S. Mariposa. He’d visited this memorial many times before, but his eyes had always just skimmed over the names. The reality of such a mass tragedy had been inconceivable to him. Until now.

What kind of hell must Walter Granger have gone through, he wondered. On what should have been the triumphant end of a months-long journey, he was faced with the task of burying all but four of his ship’s complement, including his own wife and their son. Wilson Granger felt a twinge, the genetic memory, perhaps, of his Progenitor’s anguish. He wondered if the courage Walter had found in the face of tragedy had also been carried down in his genes.

“Mr. Prime Minister?”

Granger turned toward the man standing in the entryway that connected the memorial to the rest of the Capital Complex. “Captain Gold, I presume,” he said, extending his hand.

Gold took it with a firm, dry grasp. “Thank you for agreeing to talk with me.”

“Not at all,” said Granger. “I’m glad for the opportunity to discuss matters in a more…tranquil setting.”

“Meaning, without your Bringloidi counterpart.”

Granger smiled in appreciation of the Starfleet captain’s directness. “Brenna is…well, she’s a force of nature. Sometimes, everything and everyone around her just ends up getting swept up and away.”

Gold nodded in understanding. “Well, given the nature of your situation, we absolutely want to make sure all voices are clearly heard and considered.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Captain,” said Granger. “Because I want you to hear me say this, without any other voices coloring your understanding: as Mariposan Prime Minister, and on behalf of the Mariposan citizens of the United Ficus Colony, I request that the Federation help eliminate all advanced technologies from this world.”

Gold tried to hold his expression, and failed. “I have to say, I’m more than a little surprised to hear you say that.”

“I don’t doubt it. Honestly, it surprises me as well.” Granger started to pace slowly around the perimeter of the small memorial. “When our scientists discovered our DNA had degraded to the point where our future was threatened, we became obsessed with the need to preserve our society. We were willing to forget everything, even our most basic sense of morality, in order to survive.”

“You wouldn’t be the first people to do so,” said Gold, not without some sympathy. “The survival instinct is a powerful—”

“That’s not my point, Captain,” said Granger, shaking his head. “My point is, before the Bringloidi came, we never paused to consider what, exactly, we were trying to preserve. When I was confronted a decade ago with the idea of taking a wife…several wives…and of having conjugal relations with them, my first reaction was not a positive one. Nor, for that matter, were my second or third reactions.

“However, I had to adapt to our new reality, for my own self and as an example to the rest. So, like some medieval warlord forging a political alliance, I agreed to be married to the Bringloidi leader’s daughter. In the years since we’ve been together, however, sharing our lives, working in tandem toward our common goals, I’ve come to discover something.”

A tiny grin cracked Gold’s lips. “That you loved her.”

Granger shook his head slightly, even as he smiled back. “That I am even capable of love. That I can hold another person in that kind of regard. That had been leached out of us, along with our individuality, and our need to live life rather than just propagate it.” Granger swept his arm in a circle around him, indicating the names on the walls. “These people left Earth centuries ago because they wanted to better humanity. But with all their genetic expertise, they forgot the part of being human that isn’t in our DNA.”

Granger sighed, and turned to look Gold in the eye again. “Cloning saved Mariposa two hundred and fifty years ago, but it became a crutch. When Captain Picard forced us to put an end to it, we were saved again. All we’re asking you now is to continue what Captain Picard began.”

Gold’s expression was unreadable. “This decision, for you, isn’t about the attacks then, is it?”

“No,” said Granger, “I’ve given this considerable thought for several years now.”

“And it took these hostilities for the Bringloidi prime minister to come around to this way of thinking.”

Granger smiled. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

Before Gold could agree, he was interrupted by a chiming sound, and then a woman’s voice. “Lense to Gold.”

He tapped the badge on his chest and replied, “Gold here.”

“Are you still with Prime Minister Granger?”

“Yes, he’s right here.”

“Good. I need to speak with him, and Ms. Odell, too.”

“What is it?” Gold asked. “You’ve discovered something about this bioweapon?” Gold frowned when his question was answered with silence. “Lense?”

“Yes and no,” the woman responded.

Gold exchanged a confused look with Granger. “What does that mean?”

“Yes, I’ve discovered something about the virus,” Lense’s voice answered. “And no, it’s not a weapon.”