Chapter 6: Infected
[USS Enterprise-D — Main Engineering — 2364, Three Days After Farpoint]
The distress call from the USS Tsiolkovsky came in at oh-seven-forty, and Cole's coffee went cold before he could finish it.
Three days of relative calm. Three days of routine diagnostics, standard operations, the Enterprise settling into her maiden cruise like a thoroughbred finding its stride. Cole had used the time well—studying his PADD's technical databases at night, learning the systems he was supposed to already know, testing the boundaries of his Technology Assimilation in controlled moments when no one was watching. Brief touches against inert components. Quick reads of simple devices. Building a baseline understanding of what his ability could do without the adrenaline of crisis pushing it past safe limits.
He'd also eaten approximately six thousand calories a day. The enhanced body demanded fuel the way a furnace demanded coal, and the replicator's infinite patience with his requests for protein-heavy meals and carbohydrate supplements was one of the genuinely miraculous things about the 24th century. No judgment. No cost. Just food, every time he asked.
Now the Tsiolkovsky was broadcasting a distress signal, and Cole's hands tightened on his coffee mug hard enough to hear the composite creak.
He knew this episode. The Naked Now. Polywater intoxication—a variant of the compound that had nearly destroyed Kirk's Enterprise a century ago. The Tsiolkovsky's crew were dead. Frozen. Killed by their own impaired judgment after the intoxication stripped their inhibitions and rational thought. And the disease was going to come aboard the Enterprise through the away team.
Everyone was going to get drunk. Functionally, catastrophically drunk—acting on every impulse, every buried desire, every suppressed thought. Wesley Crusher was going to take over Engineering. Somebody was going to try to blow up the ship. And somewhere in the chaos, Tasha Yar was going to—
Cole shut that thought down. Hard.
You can't warn them. You can't tell Medical to prepare an antidote before they've identified the pathogen. You can't explain how you know what's about to happen.
The away team returned from the Tsiolkovsky within the hour. Reports trickled in: the entire crew dead, environmental controls deliberately deactivated. Dr. Crusher was analyzing samples. Everything proceeded exactly as Cole remembered, which was both reassuring and maddening.
He watched the Engineering crew for signs. Waited. Catalogued every handshake, every casual contact, every shared tool and touched console. The polywater compound spread through skin contact—fast, insidious, invisible until the behavioral changes became unmistakable.
La Forge was first.
He came into Engineering an hour after the away team's return, and Cole knew immediately. Not through energy perception—through his eyes. La Forge's VISOR was slightly askew, which never happened. His gait had loosened, the precise economy of movement replaced by something looser, freer. His face wore an expression Cole had never seen on him before: open wonder, completely unguarded.
"Have you ever really looked at this ship?" La Forge ran his hand along the warp core's housing with the reverence of a man touching something holy. "The energy patterns. The way the plasma flows. It's like—it's like music, you know? This whole ship is singing, and nobody stops to listen."
"Geordi." Argyle's voice carried a warning. "Report to sickbay."
"Sickbay? Why?" La Forge laughed—a bright, startled sound. "I feel amazing. Better than I've felt in years. Don't you want to hear the ship sing?"
He moved through the bay, touching consoles, running his fingers along conduit housings, and where he touched, he left invisible traces of the compound that would infect whoever touched those surfaces next. Cole tracked his path with the cold precision of a man watching a contagion spread in real time. Console three. The warp diagnostic station. The tool rack by junction access. The—
La Forge's hand landed on Cole's forearm.
Contact. Skin to skin, La Forge's palm warm and slightly damp against the exposed inch of wrist between Cole's sleeve and his hand. The touch lasted two seconds. La Forge was already moving past, gesticulating at the warp core, talking about resonance harmonics.
The cold hit Cole three seconds later.
Not cold exactly—more a numbness that started at the contact point and radiated inward, climbing his forearm like frost spreading across glass. His enhanced immune system responded immediately: elevated white cell production, targeted inflammatory response, metabolic rate spiking. He could feel the battle beginning at the cellular level—augmented biology versus alien intoxicant, his rewritten genetics throwing every defense at the invader.
The compound pushed back. It was designed to affect humanoid neural chemistry at a fundamental level, and while Cole's enhanced physiology was fighting it harder than any baseline human could, "fighting" wasn't "winning." The numbness reached his elbow. His thoughts acquired a strange, fizzy quality at the edges—not impaired, but loosened, like a guitar string tuned half a step flat.
Twenty minutes, he estimated. Maybe thirty. Then my filter's gone, same as everyone else's.
He had to work fast.
"Argyle." Cole crossed to the chief engineer's station. Argyle was still coordinating La Forge's removal—security was escorting him to sickbay, though he went cheerfully, telling the guards about the color of their biosigns. "Sir, we may have a contamination situation. I'd recommend restricting Engineering to essential personnel and initiating protocol—"
"Already on it." Argyle's jaw was tight. "Sickbay just confirmed: the away team brought back some kind of intoxicant. Spreads through perspiration. Half the ship's affected."
"Half?"
"And climbing."
The next hour was a controlled collapse. Reports flooded the comm channels—crewmembers abandoning posts, security officers unable to maintain order, sections of the ship going dark as infected personnel deactivated systems for reasons that made perfect sense to their compromised minds and no sense to anyone else. Dr. Crusher was working on an antidote, but the original compound from the Kirk-era incident didn't match the new strain's molecular structure.
Cole worked through it. His hands kept moving across the console—monitoring power distribution, covering the stations abandoned by infected engineers, keeping the critical systems alive. The enhanced physiology bought him time, slowed the compound's progression from minutes to something longer, but it couldn't stop the tide entirely.
He caught himself humming. Stopped. Started again thirty seconds later without realizing it.
His thoughts were drifting. Not wildly—not the full-blown delirium affecting the worst-hit crewmembers—but the careful walls he'd built since waking in Coleman's body were developing cracks. The constant vigilance that kept his secrets locked down was eroding, replaced by an dangerous honesty that whispered what's the point of hiding?
A crewman stumbled past, shirtless, laughing about quantum mechanics. Two more were arguing in Klingon near the port conduit access—neither of them was Klingon. Torres sat at her station with tears streaming down her face, smiling, telling no one in particular about her daughter on Cestus III.
"Chief?" Cole turned to Argyle's station. Empty. He scanned the bay. Argyle was standing at the main viewport, one hand pressed against the glass, staring at the stars with an expression of profound loss.
"It's so far away," Argyle said softly. "Home. It's so far away, and we just keep going further."
Damn it.
Cole was alone. The only functional engineer in a bay full of people who'd stopped caring about things like reactor stability and life support continuity. The compound buzzed in his bloodstream, warm and insistent, and a part of him—growing louder by the minute—wanted to stop fighting it. Just relax. Just feel. Just be honest for once in this borrowed life.
"Engineering to bridge." He hit the comm. "This is Lieutenant Coleman. Chief Argyle is... indisposed. I'm the only one still on duty down here. What's my situation?"
Static. Then a voice he didn't recognize: "Bridge is compromised, Lieutenant. Commander Riker's trying to hold things together but—" Laughter in the background. Someone singing. "—we're losing people fast."
"Is anyone working on a cure?"
"Dr. Crusher's in the lab. She thinks she's close."
"How close?"
"She said—hold on—she said the original formula needs modification. Another hour. Maybe less."
An hour. Cole looked at the warp core. Looked at the master console, where three warning indicators had turned amber in the last ten minutes. Looked at his own hands, which had started to tremble—not from exhaustion this time, but from the compound slowly dissolving his control.
"Understood. Coleman out."
He moved to the master console. Argyle's override codes were still logged in—the chief hadn't secured his station before the compound took him. Cole locked out non-essential functions, set the warp core to automated safety protocols, and routed critical systems monitoring to a single terminal that he could watch from one position.
Then a crewman asked him, casually, whether he thought the food on Earth was better than replicated food.
"I don't remember what food on Earth tastes like," Cole said. The words came out before he could catch them—honest, unfiltered, and terrifyingly true in a way that had nothing to do with the planet everyone assumed he meant.
The crewman blinked. "You've been in space that long?"
"Something like that." Cole bit his lip. The wound from earlier had healed—enhanced recovery—but the pain of new teeth marks gave him something to focus on. Copper on his tongue. Clarity, bought in blood.
The comm chirped. A young voice, bright with artificial confidence: "Attention Engineering. This is Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher. I've assumed control of the Engineering computer from the bridge auxiliary station."
Cole stared at the comm panel. That's the kid. He's taken over.
Warning indicators on the master console shifted from amber to red. Warp containment parameters were being accessed remotely—adjusted by someone who understood the theory but lacked the judgment to know when theory should stay theoretical.
"Crusher." Cole hit the comm. "This is Lieutenant Coleman. What are you doing with the containment field?"
"I'm making it better." Wesley's voice carried the breezy confidence of a teenager with a genius-level IQ and zero impulse control. "The field harmonics are suboptimal. I can increase efficiency by—"
"Stop. Stop adjusting. The containment field is fine."
"But I can—"
"Ensign." Cole's voice dropped. Low. Controlled. The compound was screaming in his blood but the part of him that was an engineer—the real part, the core that had survived death and rebirth and everything since—refused to let a kid blow up the warp core. "Step away from the console. That's not a request."
Silence. Then a click as Wesley locked Cole out of the remote interface.
Kid locked me out. Kid actually locked me out.
Cole turned from the comm and headed for the manual override station. If he couldn't control the warp core remotely, he'd do it hands-on. The compound made his footsteps uncertain—not staggering, but loose, as if the deck wasn't quite where his feet expected it to be. His filter was cracking wider. Thoughts leaked through that he'd normally suppress: This ship is beautiful. The core is beautiful. I can feel it humming in my bones. I should tell someone. I should tell—
He reached the manual station. Placed his hands on the override panel. The Technology Assimilation activated—slower than usual, muddied by the compound, but functional. Warp containment data flooded his awareness. Wesley's modifications were elegant, brilliant, and catastrophically unstable. The kid had identified a genuine efficiency improvement but missed the second-order thermal effects that would destabilize the matter/antimatter reaction within twenty minutes.
Cole initiated the manual override. Locked the containment field to standard parameters. Shut down the remote access port entirely.
His hands were shaking. His vision had gone soft at the edges. The compound was winning—not fast, but steadily, his enhanced immune system losing ground millimeter by millimeter.
Cure. Where's the cure.
The comm crackled: "Medical to all sections. Antidote synthesized. Distribution beginning immediately."
Cole slumped against the manual station. The warp core pulsed—steady, contained, ignorant of how close a teenager had come to turning it into a bomb.
Around the bay, hyposprays arrived in the hands of barely-functional medics. One by one, the engineering crew surfaced from the intoxication like divers breaking water—confused, embarrassed, suddenly aware of what they'd been doing for the last two hours. Argyle stepped away from the viewport and looked at the bay with the expression of a man who'd woken up at a party he didn't remember attending.
A medic reached Cole. The hypospray hissed against his neck. The compound's warmth drained away, replaced by a sharp, medicinal clarity that made him wince.
"Lieutenant." The medic checked her tricorder. "Your blood chemistry is... unusual. You metabolized a significant portion of the compound independently. How do you feel?"
"Like I need to sleep for a week." Cole rubbed his face. "But I'll settle for a meal."
The medic frowned at her tricorder, started to say something, then was called away by another patient. Cole watched her go and catalogued the moment under close calls. An unusual blood chemistry flag. One more data point that could eventually lead to questions he couldn't answer.
Argyle found him twenty minutes later. The chief's face was pale, his mouth a thin line.
"You held Engineering." Not a question.
"Someone had to."
"The containment field logs show a manual override. Wesley Crusher's modifications—"
"Would have destabilized the reaction in about twenty minutes, sir. I locked him out."
Argyle stared at him. The same look from the junction 12 save. The same calculation behind the eyes. "You identified a second-order thermal instability while under the influence of an intoxicant that incapacitated every other officer in this section."
Cole said nothing.
"Lucky timing?" Argyle's voice was dry as sand.
"Something like that."
Argyle held the look for five long seconds. Then he nodded, once, and walked to the master console to begin the post-incident diagnostic.
Cole sat at station four. The bay was returning to normal—chastened, professional, nobody making eye contact while they all processed whatever they'd said and done while their filters were gone. The compound's effects were receding ship-wide. Dr. Crusher's antidote worked.
The coffee from this morning was still sitting where he'd left it, untouched, stone cold. Cole picked it up and drank it anyway. It tasted like nothing. His body wanted calories, not flavor.
Through the Engineering viewport, stars burned in their fixed patterns. The Enterprise hummed around him—whole, functional, alive. Twelve hundred people shaking off a collective lapse in judgment and getting back to work.
Cole set the empty mug in the recycler. His shift log showed six hours of solo Engineering management. Argyle's override codes used with authorization. Wesley Crusher's containment modifications reverted and flagged. One medic's anomalous blood chemistry reading, filed somewhere in sickbay's database.
He pulled up the diagnostics queue. Junction 7-alpha's repair was finally scheduled for tomorrow—delayed by every crisis since he'd found the fracture on his first day. Four days ago. It felt like a year.
His combadge chirped. "Security to Lieutenant Coleman."
Cole's chest tightened. "Coleman here."
"This is Lieutenant Yar. I'm compiling the incident report for the intoxication event. I understand you were the last functional officer in Engineering?"
Tasha Yar's voice. Clear, professional, carrying the clipped precision of someone who'd grown up fighting and learned discipline as armor.
"That's correct."
"I'll need a statement. My office, oh-nine-hundred tomorrow."
"I'll be there."
The channel closed. Cole exhaled. First contact with the woman he'd watched die on a television screen—and here she was, alive, professional, asking him to fill out paperwork.
He turned back to his console. The warp core pulsed. The ship moved through the stars, carrying its crew toward whatever came next—and Cole's hands were finally steady on the controls.
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