Star Trek #1700: Bitter Medicine

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: S.C.E. #41, Pocket Books, June 2004

CREATORS: Dave Galanter

STARDATE: On the fifth day of the mission, the stardate is 54101.9

PLOT: As the da Vinci follows the trail of Alluran ships who have had contact with a potentially diseased derelict ship, Dr. Lense, Gomez and Corsi are left aboard that mysterious space hulk in EV suits to investigate the contagion. They find the crew long dead and an alien child, the only survivor and the carrier of a genetically-engineered virus. After she recklessly promises to cure him, the boy takes a shine to Lense and she feels an increasingly strong pull to succeed. Except she finds out he's a virus factory whose body updates the virus after it encounters other species so as to kill more efficiently. The Allurans who found the derelict first are all dead, as is the boy's home planet, as the da Vinci discovers. Ultimately, the crew discovers that the race destroyed itself when the virus got out of hand and that all their children were asymptomatic carriers who would safely "grow out of" the disease when they reached puberty, which for them meant centuries. They leave the boy aboard the repaired ship with holo-emitters that simulate his parents and, unbeknownst to her, Lense herself.

CONTINUITY: The mission information came from the U.S.S. Lexington, Lense's first posting (Explorers). The Allurans wear force-field belts rather than EV suits, like Kirk's crew in The Animated Series. When talking about unethical medical experiments, Lense name-checks the Cardassian Crell Moset (Nothing Human) and the Romulan T'sart (the TNG novel, Dead Zone).

DIVERGENCES: I find it odd that neither Lense nor the author reference the Lexington AS her first posting.

SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK - The covers have started showing scenes from the books instead of headshots and ships. Who am I to argue? The away team finds a child in the derelict's conduits:

REVIEW: A rare Lense story, and of the type that has a crew member get obsessed with a case to the point of endangering their careers (think Pen Pals for Data, or Meridian for Dax). And I don't think we understand Lense well enough - she's just so rarely the focus in S.C.E. - to make a determination about her state of mind either way. Galanter writes it well, regardless, and though I don't quite get the medical technobabble (and alien races with super-long lifespans feel ridiculous even if they are a Trek trope), the quarantine protocols used are much more believable than anything on televised Trek. Worth checking out just on that basis. Ultimately a very sweet story with a nice ending.