to spend some time with the ship’s counselor. Do you disagree?”
“When…” Burgy cleared hir throat. “When you put it that way…”
“Then I suggest you attend to your own needs, and stop worrying about our mission to New Thallon. It’s all in hand, Burgy. Have a little faith.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry to bother you.”
Calhoun rolled over onto his back and interlaced his fingers behind his head. “No bother at all, I assure you.”
Burgoyne left Calhoun’s quarters, feeling somewhat dazed. S/he was unsure of what had just transpired in there, but s/he was so distracted by the things that Calhoun had said about Selar that s/he wasn’t able to give it much thought. Instead all hir concerns were self-directed, rather than pondering anything having to do with Captain Calhoun.
Which was exactly what Calhoun had wanted.
Daystrom Institute
Shortly Thereafter
Seven had fallen asleep, much against her will. The fact that she had been awake for thirty-two hours straight would have been a sufficient excuse as far as anyone else was concerned, but Seven was determined to tough it out. Unfortunately, her body was in conflict with her on that point, and even though she intended to rest her eyes only for a few seconds, she was unconscious before she knew what hit her.
She was sitting in a chair in the computer lab, and she had slumped back in it with her head tilted to one side. There was a bit of spittle drooling from the corner of her mouth.
The Doctor stood in front of her, watching her for a moment, and then he reached over and wiped away the spittle with his finger.
“You have a sample of her DNA right there,” came Soleta’s voice from behind him. “You planning to clone her?”
Looking slightly embarrassed, the Doctor wiped his hand on his shirt and then straightened up in that way that people do when they feel they’ve been caught at something. “I have plenty of her DNA on file if I were interested in doing that,” he said haughtily, and then he frowned. “That didn’t come out exactly the way I planned it.”
“My sympathies,” said Soleta, not sounding especially sympathetic. “Come. I need your opinion on the growth rate of the virus.”
The Doctor followed her into the adjoining lab. The technicians of the Daystrom Institute had been particularly generous in providing use of their facilities, especially considering that the Doctor had refused to tell them to what use they were being put. He simply assured them that it was a matter of Federation security, and that he would do nothing to blow up the lab. They took him at his word and cleared out.
Growing a nano-virus was a tricky endeavor. It had to be monitored constantly, and extreme vigilance needed to be exerted lest the virus find a means of escaping. Were that to happen, the results could be catastrophic. There was one race of would-be conquerors, the Cineen, who attempted to develop just such a virus, but they lacked the facilities to properly control it. The virus escaped and, instead of becoming the dominant race of their system, the Cineen wound up practically back in the stone age, with their planet under quarantine for a hundred years—the projected amount of time required for the virus to run its course. As a result, growing a nano-virus was not something undertaken lightly. Indeed, had the heads of the Daystrom Institute known about it, they might have thought twice about permitting the Doctor to develop one in their facility.
Once in the lab, the Doctor went straight to the kinetic simulator and studied the readings. “The nano-molecular mechanisms are performing exactly within the anticipated parameters.”
“Yes. And I believe the gp1 promoters have moved from class 1 to class 2,” said Soleta.
“I concur,” said the Doctor. “Faster than expected, actually.”
“I managed to expedite their development.”
The Doctor looked at her with interest. “How did you solve the ordinary differential equations?”
“I used a fourth-order Runge-Kutta algorithm. It enabled me to translocate the T7 nano-DNA.”
“Of course.” The Doctor was suitably impressed, and he let it show. “That was very innovative of you. You should be a science officer. Oh wait, you were. Before you walked away from Starfleet.”
“I hardly walked away. I was shoved out the door.”
“For not being forthcoming about your background.”
“For not telling anyone in Starfleet about something in my personal life that wasn’t any of their damned business.”
The Doctor “harrumphed” over that. “Hard for me to envision,” he said. “I would think that Starfleet has a good reason to be