Patients First

The Lotus' CMO lifted only an eyebrow at Captain Gould's outburst. She made a couple of taps on her PADD, sending the order to the ship's Counselor to move his stress evaluation up to the very top of the list of all crew. Right after the meeting. Something was bothering him deeply, and it would do neither the Lotus, nor Starfleet, nor the Captain himself any good if it was not immediately resolved.

Jolie looked at the image of the Azimuth Horizon, its giant, jagged lines of energy radiating from the center. It reminded her of a massive cancerous tumor, tendrils of death leeching away life as it spread through its host. Modern medicine had long ago eliminated the need for toxic chemotherapies that poisoned the patient nearly as much as the cancer itself, or heavy doses of radiation that killed normal tissues along with the abnormal. Now, medications and nanites targeted only the cancer cells, turning them off completely and re-engineering the DNA to prevent replication, or cutting off their energy source, or sometimes even convincing the body that the cancer was indeed an invader, and teaching the host to build antibodies that killed off the cancer cells just like it did for bacteria and viruses.

Ideas swirled around her head. The Klingons and Romulans would be irrelevant if none of them survived the Horizon. They had to focus on curing the infection that was rampaging through the universe. But Starfleet had to be the one to treat the universe first, before the Romulans did the ancient Earth equivalent of bombarding the patient with therapies that hurt as much as they helped.

She thought to herself, this Azimuth Horizon is like a cancer. We need to cure it rather than treating it. The Romulans are trying to kill it, the Klingons are trying to re-engineer it. We need to do several things to prevent both factions from doing their worst, and we need to do it before they can act. When oncologists treat cancer and immunologists treat infections, they do it in several ways. They cut off the cancer's energy source, they make it so the cancer can't continue to grow by re-wiring its DNA, and they teach the body to fight off its own invading cells like it does with bacteria.

We need to cut off the energy supply at its source. Also, right now, the Horizon travels along these subspace fractures. We have to make those fractures too hard for the Horizon to continue to travel through them. We also need to 'rewire' the Horizon so that it can't continue to spread.

The last thought convinced her that she just might need to see the Counselor right after the meeting, too. We need to teach our universe itself how to recognize the Horizon as an 'invader', and help it build its equivalent of 'antibodies' to fight off what has become a raging infection.

Her onyx eyes flicked back and forth between the hologram of the Horizon and the scientific and medical data on her PADD as her mind raced for the answer that seemed so very close but infuriatingly out of reach.