Tea and Misfortune

Posted on Fri 9th Dec, 2016 @ 5:49am by Lieutenant Commander Lanis Dhuro MD

1,382 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Murder on the Silent Night Express
Location: Pearl With a Chainsaw, Deck 666

"Shall I pour?" Lanis asked, indicating the teapot. He studied it. "I have a cast-iron pot in my quarters that my wife and I used. There's something soothing and meditative about drinking tea. We used to drink it and sit outside at night, looking up at the stars. I still brew tea in it and look out my window." He poured tea into Chlamydia's cup and his own and then set the teapot down. He inhaled the fragrant, steaming liquid before sipping it unsweetened. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this exquisite outing?"

Addams lifted the dabber from the honey pot, and languidly dripped golden sweetness into her own cup. "I was under the impression you wished to discuss the manner of Lance Corporal Aleksasdottir's death?"

Lanis glanced around the garden. They seemed for the moment to be alone. "I figured we'd have that conversation in your office or mine, but this is much nicer."

Lanis fell silent and sipped at his tea for a moment before setting his cup down. "Her nervous system was essentially shorted out, her body depleted of electrolytes, and the mitochondria in all of her cells that I scanned appeared to be...'burned out' is the closest way I can describe it. The mitochondrial destruction was worst in her neurons--motor and sensory--but this condition was present everywhere else, too. Meanwhile, that...parasite had grown in her at a fantastic rate of speed, going by the incident report from Team 1."

Addams nodded, replacing the dauber in the honey pot. "I was surprised by the rapidity of conversion of myofilaments to carbon dioxide and parasite mass." She took a sip of her tea. "I checked the record in her tactical tricorder. It was no more than two minutes from the time of the initial puncture to the time of the eruption." She shook her head. "A shame that the transporter didn't register the parasite as a hostile life form when it transferred her to the surgical suite. With the momentum of the eruption already in place, and no warning, it is no wonder that no one managed to capture or contain it."

"To say that we were startled would be an understatement," Lanis muttered somberly. "It moved fast, and it was so thread-like, I could barely tell where it was at any given moment. We sealed the doors to the surgical suite, but it found an electrical conduit and vanished into it as if it were drawn by a magnet--which begs the question of how we are going to contain it. I reported it to Operations, but they've got their hands full, already. The Prophets help us if it reproduces, but I suspect that is exactly what it was about to do. We can't dissect the entire starbase, however fascinating it might be to try. If we do, we risk further deaths. It might be possible to isolate it by turning off power to large areas of the station and herding it to certain areas."

He sighed and took another sip of tea. "I've been running computer models using the biological patterns from that site-to-site transport to reconstruct the parasite's likely physiology. I'll send the results over to you. I've come up with an oil-based compound that might slow the parasite down if we have it on hand and encounter that creature again. But to clear it from the electrical conduits would take a gaseous compound or perhaps subjecting it to some range of the electromagnetic spectrum or possibly even sound waves."

Addams made a thoughtful sound and took another sip of her tea. "Having a physiology would help in isolating the parasite," she agreed. She set her cup down as the waitress arrived with two plates. She placed one, with half a dozen crescent shaped steamed and fried dumplings, in front of Addams, and the second, with the promised paper-thin scrambled egg wrapped around rice, wrapped around salmon, avocado, and cream cheese.

"There you go, folks. Can I get you anything else?"

"Nothing for me, save more tea, thanks," Lanis said. He glanced at Chlamydia. "Dr. Addams?"

"No," Addams said, sounding distracted. She smiled at the young woman absently, with the result that it looked as if she were considering vivisection. The waitress returned the smile uneasily, and departed.

"It occurs to me," Addams said, and then paused before changing tracks. "I was called upon to perform an autopsy today. The decedent was apparently deliberately infected with a parasitic nematode."

"The Dopterian murder victim? Why do you say deliberately?" Lanis asked. He bit into a piece of his Sakemaki. "I mean, how would you be able to say, for certain?"

Addams picked up the replicated rosewood chopsticks in her left hand, and used them to lift one of the little dumplings. "The life cycle of the nematode," she answered, dunking the dumpling in the small dish of soy sauce which stood to hand. "You see, the larvae require an intermediate host, water fleas. It is only when the flea is ingested and digested that the infectious form of the parasite is able to infest the host. So, lacking deliberate action, either everyone aboard a ship would have the parasite, or no one would."

Lanis made a face. "So someone fed the victim fleas in his water? Charming." He pressed the second half of his first slice of sakemaki into the green paste he saw on his plate and bit into it. Moments later, his eyes went huge and began to tear up. Lanis coughed. "Holy Prophets! What is this stuff? It would make some intense hasperat!"

"Wasabi," Addams said, a faint smile of schadenfreude playing about her lips. "My point, however, is this: suppose Lance Corporal Aleksasdottir was a water flea?"

"Now there you go, ruining a perfectly good meal with supposition," Lanis said wryly as he dipped a piece of sakemaki in the wasabi paste again--more sparingly, this time--and ate it. "In other words, you're saying every person on this starbase could potentially become a water flea, and we therefore might well have a critical problem." He sipped at his tea, deep in thought. "I presume you've given some thought as to the hand behind it--if there is one?"

Addams ate the gyoza she was holding before responding, "One way to verify whether the hypothesis is reasonable would be to scan for concentrations of decaying organic matter throughout the station. Yes, you'd likely locate some farmer's compost pile, but you'd also locate past hosts for the larvae." She waved her chopsticks vaguely. "Which is aside from the question you've actually asked. Was this infestation as deliberate as the late Captain's? At this stage, I can't think of a way to tell. If a larva came aboard the station from a docked vessel, the infestation could have occurred naturally. On the other hand, if one was planted by some malicious party, we do not have enough data at present to even profitably speculate on who that party might be, or what their motivation is."

"The station was understaffed for so long, it's probably fruitless to investigate that question in the short term," Lanis agreed. "I'm sure we could request that someone in Sciences check the FCDA archived logs to search for the onset date of the electrical failures and track the progression pattern forward in time from there, and then correlate it to ships docked here at the time. But we need to immediately plan a strategy to contain and eradicate the parasite."

"You mentioned a possible paralytic," Addams observed, finishing the sip of tea she'd taken while Dhuro was speaking. "Why don't you work on developing the observations of the escaped parasite into a scan profile, and developing the paralytic. I'll coordinate with Operations on scanning for past larval hosts, and with Security on verifying the extent of the infestation."

Lanis grimaced. "Oil based. It would be messy, but it could work. I'll start developing the scan profile right away. Once that's done, I can get a chemist to refine the paralytic and run tests. You'll have the scan profile before I go off shift today."

Addams nodded. "I believe we have time to finish our tea, first," she said, picking up another dumpling. "That would be the civilized thing to do."

 

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