Chapter 2
The war brought T’Volis to Earth often, which was fortunate, as it brought Diane there too, and as Starfleet allowed her considerably less leisure now, it meant she could see both T’Volis and her family at once. It brought, in short order, a promotion and switch to command track for Diane, and a new assessment of the risks in Diane’s career for T’Volis.
Initially only an infectious disease researcher during her graduate studies, she found herself quickly pulled onto a Starfleet biodefense task force a few short weeks after receiving her degree. Once through the layers of security approval, she found it thoroughly appalling. Once, a task force including the Bedivere disrupted a Dominion operation involving a particularly virulent biogenic weapon meant for deployment on a Klingon colony world; she was responsible for analyzing the genetic sequence of the virus, and simulating its effects. The idea of Diane being on the same ship with the thing kept her awake for weeks afterward.
Then, during another assignment at the Institut Pasteur, that ancient august body drafted into the war effort like everyone else, there was an autopsy. A Dominion research facility had fallen into Federation hands, and they found Starfleet personnel there–or at least, that Starfleet personnel had been there, as experimental subjects. Infectious disease specialists were invited–requested–because of concerns about biogenic weapons.
T’Volis had attended and done autopsies before. Since the subject was dead, they had never particularly disturbed her. Indeed, she had felt it was an opportunity to do something for the dead–to uncover how they had died, and perhaps protect others from a similar demise. But one of the cadavers was a human woman with dark hair, and when T’Volis looked at her records to assess preexisting conditions, if any, she realized that the woman had been Diane’s age almost exactly–date of birth was a week off, and then it became exceedingly difficult to stop seeing the similarities, or the realization of this being one of the many dangers Diane faced. The face of the dead woman was swollen and bruised from hemorrhage, her features blurred; it was too easy to imagine another face there, though she kept her imagination strictly in check, put it from her mind as deliberately as placing something in a recycle slot. But the other thought was harder to banish. Diane took risks. A lot of them. Diane was a senior officer on a front-line ship, and it would be too easy for her to fall into enemy hands, it would be too easy for her to end up on an autopsy table, with only her corpse to bear witness to the obscenities perpetrated against her.
That was by far the hardest to bear. And T’Volis had been bitterly acquainted with the mortality of those she loved a long time now.
Dr. Tyrell has sent everything. The full situation report on the laboratory, the relevant logs; T’Volis’s high security clearance has been reactivated, and Starfleet has sent files as well. It is comforting, to know that Diane’s superiors are so concerned for her–but it is not only her. The identification and countering of a new Dominion biogenic weapon is of great interest to the security of the Federation. Diane’s superiors will be just as eager to supply the resources with which to dissect her corpse as they are currently to save her life.
Logically, it is a reasonable approach, but T’Volis finds it dampens her appreciation for the support a great deal.
There are medical files. Some of this is familiar; the radiation burn, the appendectomy. But there are new ones; the fight in the wreckage of the Bedivere cost Diane an eye, and the replacement is cybernetic, rather than lab grown. More lacerations and disruptor burns and broken bones; a whole history of violence and risks taken, and T’Volis forces herself to close the file, because simple physical trauma, with modern medical technology, is unlikely to affect the course of illness. It is harder to do than it should be.
Easier to look at the records of the accident and exposure.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 54923.7: We are in orbit around Caterus 7, a rocky planetoid that, until recently, housed Dominion military research. The rebellion of the neighboring system, Venesiun, cut off the major Dominion supply line to this sector, and the Venesiun government has requested we examine the facilities for dangerous substances. Indeed, records indicate that the research may have included biogenic weapons. As a precaution, all away teams undertaking surveys are required to don maximum protective gear. We’re keeping missions short and limited to experienced personnel.
She had done everything right, thinks T’Volis, paging through the reports, the details of the landing party and mission. This is probably why she is the one patient. This time, the damning factor had not been Diane’s willingness to take risks.
The laboratory had been underground, the beam-in point a few hundred meters up a tunnel, the rock rich in ores that scrambled communications and transporters. So the first Diane and her team had known about the attack had been the first shot shaking them all off their feet.
Diane had ordered a return to the beam-in site, and taken the rear, making sure all her crew got out before she did, and it was what doomed her. The tunnel came down before she could get through; retrieved footage from her helmet recorder shows the faceplate fracturing. She’s lucky to have kept the other eye. T’Volis can see, in the flicker of her helmet lights, the crack across the faceplate of the mask. The thumbnail sized hole, outlined in white.
Six hours and thirty-one minutes into the recording, the suit’s struggling life support systems give up, the hiss of escaping atmosphere going silent and leaving her completely unprotected. If the lab had not remained pressurized–with all its infectious samples–she would have suffocated.
It is possible that it would have been kinder than what will happen to her, but that line of speculation is counterproductive.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes later, Diane regains consciousness. There is a groan, a faint stirring. “Chester to Interpreter.”
Nothing. Shuffling, as the camera rights itself. T’Volis knows the moment Diane sees the hole in the EVA suit. There’s a sharp ragged intake of breath, and a quiet but heartfelt obscenity.
She sits there for a while, saying nothing, her breath fast and ragged. And then, she gets up, and she begins to try to dig herself out.
It’s another three hours and seventeen minutes before her crew pulls her from the rubble.
A week after the autopsy, the Bedivere arrived on Earth. T’Volis was still there, doing a series of briefings on biogenic weapons and protocols for dealing with them, in between the actual research; everyone on the task force was rotating between several labs across the planet. The sheer volume of research demanded it. She had this lecture at Starfleet Headquarters this evening. Tomorrow morning would see her at the Bethesda International Institutes of Health, noon at the World Health Organization headquarters, and then back to the Institut Pasteur, to check the cultures from the autopsies. So far, it seemed to have been simple brutality, no pathogens, but the possibility has yet to be completely ruled out.
She was very tired. The unshielded minds around her were a cacophony, she didn’t think she had been properly warm since she stepped onto the shuttle departing Vulcan, and the humidity of a San Francisco afternoon had filled her sinuses with permacrete. She was tired, and she was discouraged, and more than ready to be done with the lecture, hoping no one would come up with any clever questions before she could make her escape to the relative calm of her visiting researcher’s quarters, when a sudden sense of reassurance brought her head up, like a single true note through the roaring noise.
Diane was standing just inside the doorway, a pleased, fond expression in her eyes and the curve of her mouth. The sense of her was someone coming back to a refuge. But past the calm, there were dark smudges under her eyes, exhaustion in the slump of her shoulders, and when the last of the students had filed out and she came to help T’Volis with her notes at the podium–unnecessary human chivalry–there was a hint of a limp in her gait.
“You are injured.”
“Not recently. It’s stiff when I stand still too long, and Dr. Harris says it will fade over the next few days. How are you?”
Terrified for you, T’Volis thought, unbidden. She had spent the week with corpses, people so much like Diane who’d died alone in pain and humiliation. She reminded herself that Diane had applied to a transfer to Strategic Analytics, where her skills could be put to better use, and where she would have far better odds of survival.
Aloud she said, “Tired. The humidity does not agree with my sinuses.”
“Let’s get dinner somewhere drier then,” said Diane, cheerful, “and then spend some time together before you have to go off to Maryland, which, let me assure you, will be a very great deal wetter.”
“It will. I intend to spend all my time in the medical center.”
Diane talked as they went, the surface-level current events that she could relate; crew gossip, a handful of support activities like providing supplies for water purification and agricultural activities. Not the war. After dinner, well after dinner, when they were standing in a park looking at one of Earth’s horrifyingly endless seas, she said, “I didn’t apply for the transfer to Analytics.”
T’Volis turned sharply to look at her. “Why not? Your skills are needed in decryption and code-breaking; you would be a useful asset.”
“There’s no one to replace me on the Bedivere,” said Diane. “Skill shortage. I’m third in the line of command now. There’s our chief engineer after me, and then a twenty-three year old kid. I can’t leave them.”
T’Volis had to take a far longer moment to compose herself. “Your attachment to your colleagues does you credit. However, I cannot say that it was a logical decision.”
“You’re right, but it was an ethical one,” said Diane, which meant she could not be moved. “I can’t leave them. The damage would be unjustifiable.”
The disappointment was nearly overpowering. T’Volis watched the sea, trying to let go of it, but the face of the dead officer was too easy to remember. Also too clear: the memory of her grandmother when Diane’s name was mentioned, just before she left Vulcan on this trip, and saying, “Whatever her character, that woman is not one you can build a house with.” It had been tempting to dismiss it as xenophobia, but T’Volis’s grandmother wasn’t prone to that variety of illogic; no, it had been because the dead were no help at all in building a house.
She turned to fully face Diane, who turned to her as well. “Please,” she said. “I have spent this week with what the Dominion would like to do to you. Your skills are needed. Your contribution to the war would be greater. You are not simply–meat to be thrown at the enemy.”
Something came into Diane’s face then, not something that T’Volis had ever seen before. It was something terribly cold and strangely ancient, implacable and ruthless, and it was not the woman she loved. She could imagine cruelty in the lines around Diane’s mouth, and Diane abruptly turned her face away as if she knew what T’Volis had seen and it shamed her to the bone.
“It’s not simply being cannonfodder,” she said after a moment that stretched far, far too long, still looking at the sea and not T’Volis. “I wish it was.”
T’Volis stayed silent, shaken. It was fading out of Diane’s face, as she mastered herself in turn. When she could finally bear to face T’Volis, her eyes were wet, her lips pressed together. The breath before she spoke was long and shaky. “It turns out I am very good at killing people,” she said, and the brutality of the statement was aimed inward, “and I am a very good soldier. For all our ideals, the Federation needs both right now.”
“Don’t do this to yourself.” Reflexive, sharp. “This is not you.”
Diane shook her head, a little sharp gesture. “I’m not so sure about that. And either way–it’s what Starfleet needs of me now. These questions aren’t going to matter if we lose. And if we don’t…”
She glanced around; the park was almost deserted, and she offered two fingers to T’Volis. There was no hesitation, even after seeing that thing in Diane’s face. T’Volis pressed her own against them, feeling the solid steady sense that was the woman who she very much hoped would be her wife, and nothing at all of the other thing she had glimpsed for an instant in the fading California sun.