Quarantine

"So let me get this straight." Sparrow growled in frustration, "Even knowing we have no cure the people are electing to stay on the planet?"

"We don't have a cure but we do have a way to eliminate the danger." said Kai, strongly in favor of the proposal.

"Not eliminate," Alexis was sure to point out, "We can greatly reduce it, yes, but if the substance drops below a minimum level in the bloodstream full symptoms will show up quickly."

"I've fully researched the amino chain you found Alexis," the engineer shared, "we can have a facility turning out a daily pill that will keep the saturation at more than high enough levels, it's not as dangerous as it seems."

"The chances of something going wrong though." Sparrow was terrified at the idea.

"Let our people make the choice." Akira finally advised. "Put all the information out there, make sure they have access to these pills we need, and then let them make the decision."

"I agree." The chorus went around the table in the holo-meeting room.

"I guess I'm outvoted." Sparrow sadly commented. "If everyone else agrees I will go with the decision. I just fear for our people."

"We know."

"Miley, what is wrong?" He asked. He had watched her staring at the bed where Siscasse lay for the entire meeting, a confused frown on her face.

"Something is wrong." she said.

"She's going through the change, it will take her a couple of hours longer to wake up." Alexis commented.

That is when Akira realized the problem.

"No, she isn't going through the change."

"I injected her with fresh blood myself," Miley told her, "there's no way she isn't."

"We have been meeting for at least a half an hour and you had already injected her before that. No one else took even a fraction of this amount of time to change. Something is different."

Miley rushed over and started checking the patient. She ended up drawing a sample of her blood and placing it in the medical scanner. After reviewing the data for a minute she announced. "She's right. I don't know how but she has no edited cells."

"So what does that mean?" Sparrow asked.

"I don't know." Miley responded. "If we can figure out why then perhaps we can solve our other serious health concern, and do it with a much less radical solution than the one you proposed."

Sparrow blushed but he didn't back down. He really felt it was a better option to clone and replace all of them, including himself, than to let the danger they posed continue.

Looking at the woman on the table he was even pretty sure what race he would choose when the time came.

They just stayed in the portable lab while the information was shared with everyone and people decided whether to stay or not. It made him feel good to find that nearly everyone was willing to risk infection and take the medication to stay, even if it also terrified him.

Siscasse woke up and he was instantly at her side.

"Welcome back." he said in her language. He made a note to have those new chips spread among his people as widely as they could. He had absolutely no issues with the transfer of the knowledge, it just felt like he had known it all along.

"Am I going to die?" She asked.

"No." He then explained all about the rodents and the temporary medication.

"So this medicine will cure us?"

"Not exactly," he told her, "You will still have the virus but it will not harm you."

"My people would have been happy to have so much." She replied sadly.

"I don't mean to sound ungrateful, like I do not appreciate what the doctors have found, but my people are willing to stay and be infected and rely on us providing this medicine and I am scared that something could go wrong."

"Actually, now that I think about it, this was your world a long time before we tried to make it ours. I suppose it is your choice if we can stay."

"I think that the few of us who remain will have no problem sharing." She frowned, and Sparrow felt it all the way to his toes. He did not understand what this link was between them, but it was so strong.

"She noticed his reaction, and she went ahead and addressed it.

"You feel the link as well?" She asked.

"Is that what you call this? I have never felt anything like it."

"It is a gift, of sorts, of my people. We feel this when we meet the one we are meant for. It makes for long and happy relationships, I am told."

"Do you know how it works?"

"My people could never quite decide," she said. "We did some experimenting to try and understand it but never got a definitive answer. Most who have

experienced it are just happy it exists."

"We should talk about the rest of my people before we proceed any further. I am told once the bonding process starts that it is very intense and that we will not be good for much else until it is over."

Sparrow was elated that she evidently felt them getting together was a foregone conclusion. He basked in that feeling for a few seconds and then realized she was staring at him.

"What's wrong?" He asked her.

"My people, if we wake them now we will be infecting them. As long as they remain in their capsules they are safe."

"Yes, I agree. Our doctors are working on an actual cure, if you wish we can leave your people where they are until it is developed and tested. We can free them when there is no virus left."

"I must think on this, it is a weighty decision indeed."

"For what it is worth, I agree with you. It is not a decision to be made lightly, my people and I struggled with it as well."

"I need to consider, and to learn."

"We have a way to help with that, if you will trust us." Sparrow told her.

She looked at him curiously, so he filled her in on their new invention of the training chips, and that was how he had learned her language so quickly.

She was thrilled, she all but demanded he give her this as soon as he could so she could learn all about him and his people.

He agreed, but only with the caveat that Miley ensure that it was safe to use on her species.

She was too excited to wait so he talked to Miley immediately, Miley wasn't worried about any major side effects. She had already done a full, (extremely full after the revelation that the gene editor), work up on the young eldrie and it should work fine.

Miley did have a request that she made through Sparrow, however, she asked for permission to attempt to make a cure for the gene editor from the eldrie information she gained.

This required a lot of information. Sparrow filled the young beauty in on what had been done to him, how the others had come to be, and what he and his people were doing on Nathea. This led him into explaining, as best he could at least, the synths.

Deux was back from his mission so he brought in the droid he had been piloting and dismounted it to show Siscasse what they meant. She was delighted to meet the small construct.

It was when discussing the medical need to fix the geten's that Siscasse casually remarked that it was too bad the computer banks from the base didn't have the answer to the geten problem. They should have contained the whole of the eldrie medical database.

Quat, who was still interfaced with the base computer, immediately began a targeted search for the files, and found that portions of the base computer had failed. He used the knowledge of the system he had in order to attempt a repair and, after a few mis-starts managed to restore the lost data.

The medical database was both extremely detailed and awfully large. The eldrie had kept meticulous track of every treatment and every experiment conducted by, or on, their people from the moment of their creation.

The database was so large, in fact, that the synths resorted to conducting a partial merge so that they could all aid Quat in processing it.

After poring through the massive amounts of data they presented their conclusions.

The planet the eldrie came from had been known for several viruses that attacked the DNA of host cells. The creators of the servant race had, therefore, designed their DNA to be resistant. They did this by making the cell wall itself much thicker. Unfortunately this thicker cell wall had cost them when it came to the sith virus. The thicker wall

provided both a better anchor point and the capability for a higher number of virus cells to bond with the host cells.

No one initially saw the way this could be used in solving the problem with the gene editor. A sense of disappointment permeated the discussion as Siscasse was injected with a learning chip and her education was begun.

On the CIS ship though, Alexis had an epipheny. She ran several simulations, and, once she saw the results she sat down at one of the specialized stations in the cloning lab and got to work editing the geten cell.

While Alexis was working on a solution to one problem Kai was working on a permanent solution to the other. He had designed a system to deliver a continuous flow of the amino chain developed from the rodents into the atmosphere of the planet. His calculations showed that as soon as enough was deployed the virus would no longer be able to reproduce due to the build up and would die out entirely.

The medical data showed that the indvidual virus cells only lived a day or two but his plan was to send out his deployers and leave them onsite for at least a week. Every simulation he ran said this would work and the virus would be killed off.

Once he had the droids and the settler work forces finish the deployment ships, (repurposed CIS bombers that had been stored onboard), and had sent small ships out to retrieve a few asteroids containing the necessary metals, he was prepared to brief the lead team.

Once everyone on the command staff was again gathered in the virtual meeting room, he began his pitch.

"We haven't found a way to kill this virus yet." he began. "But then it occurred to me that we don't actually need to kill it."

"What do you mean?" Miley asked curiously.

"If we just saturate the air on the planet with the amino chain we can stop the virus from being able to reproduce. We can effectively cause it to die of old age."

Everyone paused and thought this through. No one could come up with an objection.

"That's absolute genius!" Echo finally exclaimed.

"That is truly brilliant Kai, how long to get the process started and then how long should it take?"

"I've actually designed the delivery system using a few CIS bombers. As soon as the volunteer ships bring me back the asteroids I sent them to retrieve we should be able to make the first run delivering the substance all over the planet. If the simulations I ran are correct it should take 3 days max once the target density is reached. If no one objects I would like to keep deploying for at least two weeks, just to be sure."

"I certainly have no objections to that." Sparrow asserted. No one else raised an objection so the plan was approved.

They were about to close out the meeting when Alexis joined.

"I have a proposed solution to the geten problem, but it's a bit radical." She said confidently.