Trying To Work A Medical Miracle

Posted on Sun Jul 19th, 2026 @ 1:53pm by Lieutenant JG Diana Sereno

1,150 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: The Hand That Rocks The Babe
Location: Velis III

The hospital had been built in a day. Literally. The engineers and operations personnel of the Dreadnought had performed a literal miracle while the security forces had gently kept the desperate men and women of Velis III away at first. Several of the medical personnel had ventured out, escorted of course, to start getting initial scans and blood samples and Diana had been one of those.

It was clear that the people were suffering and her expert eyes had identified people in several stages of whatever this disease was. Her heart broke as one woman held their child, clearly unsavable, begging one of the medics to help her son. That was the problem with pandemics: By the time someone was able to help, the deaths were already rolling in and this one was no difference.

The biohazard suits that the Starfleet personnel wore were both a blessing and a curse. They did an absolutely amazing job of protecting the wearer, but they cost a lot of the personal touch that she herself preferred. Still, getting the blood samples immediately was extremely important, especially for her. She was quite possibly the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it came to infectious diseases. Probably, barring any surviving pathologists of the locals.

Behind her, the engineers were still hard at work building the ancillary buildings, including her own laboratory where she would isolate, study and develop a cure for whatever it was that was killing these people. At least, that was the hope and the plan. And there would be wards built, because as she stood from the first of her patients, she could see more coming, a lot more.

And a morgue. A big one.

****Six Days Later****

Coffee was life. Coffee and sleep and Diana Sereno know that she wasn't going to be getting any sleep anytime soon. What was worse was that she wouldn't be getting any more coffee for at least another two hours and that made her grumpy. Each night, she fell into a cot in one of the secure buildings and slept for about four hours before she got back up to bang her head against the problem all over again.

She'd taken her turns in the hospital, caring for patients right along everyone else. The masses had come in, some apparently healthy, others in the various now-well-defined stages of this virus. The initial stage showed no symptoms aside from a mild cough, but that was when the patient was the most contagious. It was determined that if three droplets of the cough were inhaled, it contained enough of a viral load to become self sustaining. Masks were of limited use, because a single CC of liquid on the skin would do the same through absorption.

Between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after the first coughing fit, the next stage hit: Extreme fatigue, muscular weakness and incontinence, the last being inconsistent among the second stage, but constant in the third. By that time, another forty-eight hours or so, the patient was bleeding from the eyes and nose, the cough now wet and fluid building in the lungs. The weaker physiques and elderly would be going through congestive heart failure and death at this point, the stronger ones just suffered more and longer.

She'd been in on several autopsies and the first one she'd thrown up in her suit from what she'd seen. The heart muscle had turned black, compared to the healthy red, several of the organs had liquified and the intestines were falling apart. It reminded her of the Ebola virus from Earth which still cropped up from time to time in the African jungles, but on steroids.

The rest of her time she spent here in the lab, where she'd isolated the virus with relative ease. A micrograph and gene mapping hadn't elicited any answers, but that itself wasn't too abnormal. The problem was that viral infections were difficult to treat and most patients lived or died on their own, with supportive care being the best that could be done. At least, that was the past, now there were treatments for viruses. The common cold was curable, the flu was tougher but treatable to the point where dying from it was a rarity, even on the colony worlds.

This one was different. Diana had tried every treatment regimen she could try, both on actual patients and also on samples, to no avail. The samples shrugged everything but an overwhelming dosage of antivirals off and resisted the last hard. Still, in the patients it seemed to be ravenous, as if it were tailored for them. She'd gone down this rabbit hole before, fatigue was getting to her and she'd known it.

"Fuckit." She whispered to herself, unhooking her air supply and making her way towards the airlock where her suit was sprayed with a caustic solution and bombarded with high intensity UV radiation which had been proven to kill just about anything biological, then stripped out of the outfit before exiting to the small office space in this prefabricated lab. She poured herself a cup of coffee as she looked out the small window where an earthmover was digging yet another massive ditch in the field. This was what it had come down to: The dead were piling up so quickly that mass graves had become the only way to dispose of so many. Other Starfleet teams had been dispatched to the cities to do the same thing and help reduce the festering rot of so many bodies there, too.

Seven major hospital wards were partially visible from where she stood, each containing hundreds or thousands of patients, all of whom were doomed to die if she couldn't figure this out. As she sipped the strong brew, her mind was forced back to the thought it had before: Designed to attack the locals. It was impossible, of course, because who were the enemies of Velis III? They were far enough from the major powers that it would be pointless, they had no other worlds that politics had deemed as meaning them harm.

But if the general antivirals weren't affecting this thing at all, which meant that it was resistant. Too resistant. As if it had already seen the 'normal' treatments and gained an immunity to them. But what if it was introduced to something that wasn't local in genome? "Of course, Diana, you haven't been looking at that, which could make a difference."

She put the coffee down and retrieved a syringe and a tourniquet, taking thirty seconds to draw three vials of her own blood and downing the rest of the coffee quickly before placing the vials in the secure airlock and suiting up again. Three minutes later she was back on canned air and retrieving the blood samples and getting back to work.

This would be another long day, but what else was new.

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