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been there two years?”
    Adams did not reply immediately. “No. I can’t explain that.”
    It was an ambiguous answer at best.

Chapter Two
    ON THE TERMINAL screen in the conference room off sickbay, a man sat frozen at a cluttered Fleet-issue desk. His face was severe—but it was not so much his expression as the configuration of his features: ominous black brows and coarse, exaggerated lips and nose. He was stocky without being fat—muscular, with a short wide neck and powerful shoulders. He leaned forward over the desk, his thick fingers meshed together in a gesture of sincerity. Above the deeply carved lines in his forehead, his scalp was pink and smooth, hairless as a newborn’s, and the surviving fringe of wavy black hair had just begun to silver.
    Kirk had never met Mendez before, but he was struck by the strong physical resemblance the admiral bore to his younger brother, José. Jim Kirk and José Mendez had been on a first-name basis for years, since Commodore José Mendez was in charge of Star Base Eleven, where the
Enterprise
often took leave. Jim didn’t know José all that well, but he thought warmly of the man. After all, it was José who had once convinced the brass to drop the charges against Spock for violating General Order Seven.
    But there was something Kirk instinctively disliked about the brother perhaps it was the intangible air of arrogance, or the fact that the elder Mendez had the look of a bully.
    McCoy fidgeted in his swivel chair and peered impatiently at the screen. “What’s keeping Spock, anyway? It isn’t like him to be late.”
    â€œBlame it on me.” Kirk stood next to the terminal, arms folded in front of his chest. “I’ve got him looking at their records. How’s the lab coming on that virus?”
    â€œThey agree with me—the thing’s been genetically engineered.”
    â€œAny way of proving that?”
    â€œNot really, no. But I’d swear to it. We’re all working on the vaccine—no harm in it.”
    â€œWhat about a cure?”
    McCoy sighed. “We’re working on that, too, of course. I’ve made it top priority for sickbay and the lab. But it doesn’t look good for Adams.” He looked up as the door to the conference room opened.
    Spock entered and took the chair next to the doctor. “I regret the delay, Captain.” The Vulcan’s expression was typically inscrutable, but there was something in his tone that boded ill. “I’m afraid that I had some difficulty retrieving the records. Most of them were lost.”
    "Lost?”
    Spock shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair. Anyone unfamiliar with Vulcans would never have noticed. “When I initiated a scan, it activated a virus program on the Tanis computers which immediately erased all records.”
    â€œA virus program.” McCoy jabbed in Jim’s direction with an elbow. “Get it?”
    Kirk grimaced but otherwise ignored him. “No one thought to anticipate something like that happening?”
    â€œActually,” Spock continued without gracing McCoy’s remark with so much as a glance, “our computers are programmed to anticipate such a possibility—but the programming. on the Tanis computers is extremely sophisticated. It was obviously done by a class-one expert.” Spock paused, and this time Kirk was more certain that he caught a glimmer of disappointment on the Vulcan’s face. “I was able to Save some of the records which were not overlaid. It will take some time to reconstruct the data, since it is not in any coherent format. I’m afraid we were left with isolated bits of information. As for the rest, the damage was irreversible.”
    â€œYou did what you could,” Kirk said, not quite able to keep the bitterness from his voice. “We still have Adams. He’s scheduled for a computer verification scan. We can still find out what