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Therion: “It is a virus, is it not, Yorrik?”
Senna’Nir’s stomach curdled Any quarian’s would have They lived in fear of infection, even in clean rooms where no virus dared to tread, even in their suits Centuries on the Migrant Fleet had left their race with i an old handkerchief to yourat the sa haywire? This was bad This was horrendously bad And on his watch What had he done to deserve this? They were almost to Andromeda Why couldn’t that lizard have waited another couple of decades to drop dead?
“Depressed: Affiring next to the male drell body and intoned flatly: “Affectionate entreaty: ‘O good Horatio, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story’”
The painted fluorescent smiley face stared back at theh his slats and keyed so into the arm The flipped faceplate lit up with information, readable to all of them instead of only to the dark interior of the suit Words and nu the visual field, a crawl of datathe chinline, just like Senna’s own interior display He felt oddly naked with the others peering in at the view quarians saw every day It felt private
“Report, Medical Specialist,” he said gruffly This was getting disorganized He needed to take co “Then Team Who, then Team How Go”
Yorrik inclined his elephantine head toward the mess of hollowed-out trash on the autopsy tables “Informative address: Chemical Specialist Ysses and I took blood and tissue sa the lab’s native equipment This concluded our use of the lab’s native equip a broad-spectrum fluorescent dye test, ere able to determine fairly quickly that none of the three victims suffered from any appreciable blood toxicity”
“This one spared us the task of listening to the microscope This one witnessed the illuradations of color necessary for diagnosis with its naked eye,” Ysses hue of pride “As vain as all such efforts to preserve order must always be,” it added quickly
“Irritated: Yes, you did very well Anxiously anand ordered us to do one hundred pull-ups, but ere able to use it, barely, to rule out bacterial infection, again through visual confirmation This left few possibilities I affirh a dye injection test As I have explained to the others, viruses are too small to be seen under a norh the surface membrane, and therefore it is possible to verify the presence of viral cells when there are undyed structures in the tissue sa what is not there It was at this point that I instructed the ship to initiate quarantine procedures It was also at this point that a nosis occurred to me I had only intended to use Horatio as a virtual test subject to synthesize possible treatetic: I am not overly fay We then injected Horatio with a blood sample from the drell female The hydraulics were immediately overwhelmed with an antibody flood; however, it has not been effective so far More importantly, in order to nize the virus It did Draious infection called Yoqtan”
Irit Non coughed and spluttered “I in order to implicate the volus Yoqtan has never killed anyone! The treat baths and a mother’s love!”
Anax Therion interjected: “Yoqtan is volus chickenpox Their species all get it when they are juveniles It is ale The syue, high fever, chills, and in severe cases, persistent nausea Only the weakest of children do not survive Yoqtan It should not have killed a thirty-year-old drell”
“It should not even be possible for her to have it,” snarled Irit Non “She doesn’t have the right glands And anything that could thrive in our blood should turn hers into a half-frozen estured at the elegant fiberher body “We don’t wear them because our iust of wind Our nor like yours Outside of Irune’s high-pressure jungles or my suit, our bodies would blow up like a balloon, split open and whatever was left would desiccate ioddamned atet us, we are allergic to oxygen Your blood is full of it Yoqtan just could not survive in a drell It needs the sa, elcor? I didn’t think elcor could lie!”
“Insulted: We can act, can’t we? Furious indignance: Look at Horatio You can see I ara it doesn’t want to do? Attempted explanation: Please look for yourself You can see the electron analysis and RNA sequencing It is Yoqtan”
Anax Therion glanced at the concave faceplate “91 Yoqtan,” she observed
“Acknowledg: Correct The rest I cannot positively identify without proper equipment, but it seems to be an assortment of junk RNA Presumably, this is what allowed
it to infect a drell in the first place It clearly began in the drell, and runs its courseimplications: However, as I said before, drell and hanar physiology bears almost no comparison Very few viruses h that the na virus, Sangelian heic fever, Teukrian flu I cannot think of one that commonly afflicts both drell and hanar, and neither can the ship’s computer” Yorrik paused The poor man was clearly deeply disturbed “Inevitable conclusion: Either we are witnessing the birth of a new life forineered”