“What sort of a monster concocts such a thing?” Lieutenant Commander Karl Verhoeven asked incredulously as he stared at the lab results from Archanis Station. Death was the only guarantee. Death, and the spread to others before its host succumbed.

“We were no better. Maybe worse, in fact,” Commander James Henderson frowned as a shadow washed across his face, thinking back to the choices that’d been made during the war. “The Dominion bioengineered this virus to eradicate worlds, but what we built was meant to eradicate an entire species. It was an attempt at genocide, plain and simple.”

“You almost say it as though you sympathize with them.”

“That, I do not,” Commander Henderson assured his colleague. He’d stood by the bedside of far too many as they breathed their last breath during that wretched war. “I just don’t see us as all that much better.” The desperation that had driven Starfleet to unleash the morphogenic virus upon the Founders was not all that unlike that which drove the Dominion to its own evil ends. “Do you know the history of the changelings?”

The microbiologist shook his head. He did not.

“As the legend goes, before they became the Founders of the Dominion, they were victims themselves, hunted by solids that didn’t understand them,” Commander Henderson shared. “When you recognize their journey, it offers a perspective to their behavior.”

“But it doesn’t excuse it,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven insisted. “A childhood of abuse cannot be used to justify your later transgressions.”

“I do not disagree in the slightest,” Commander Henderson concurred. “But it’s something we would be well served to remember too when it comes to our own choices.” Their hands were no cleaner than the Dominion’s when it came to this sort of stuff.

“I never thought of it that way…”

“No, most people don’t.”

There was more to the story than the aged doctor was letting on, Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven could sense. “Were you involved in our work? What we unleashed on them?”

“As a specialist in interspecies medicine, I was obviously of interest,” Commander Henderson shared. “They came to me, dark men, nameless men, men who don’t exist, and they offered me an opportunity to strike back at the Dominion, to end the war, not just for now, but forever.”

“What did you do?”

“I am a healer, Karl. I took an oath to save life – not just human life, but all life,” Commander Henderson replied. “I told them, in no uncertain terms, that my work would not be used for genocide. I was in the minority though. Others in our line of work, in their desperation, said yes. They took what they knew of how to save a life, and they used it to try and end a civilization.”

“But it stopped the war, didn’t it?”

“We are healers, my friend. That oath we take, it doesn’t go away whenever it’s convenient. Those who conspired with the darker sides of Starfleet, they committed the greatest sin of our profession,” Commander Henderson replied disdainfully as he looked over at the virological telemetry on their monitors. “You ask what sort of monsters could concoct something like this, and the answer, I’m afraid, is no further away than a mirror.”

“The virus forced their surrender, and the Founders live on,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven observed. “There was no genocide, in the end.”

“Those who released it, many would have been happy to just let it run its course,” Commander Henderson assured him. “I suspect that if they got the opportunity to do it again, they probably would.” He wondered about even some of their own, the ones in Polaris Squadron and across the Fourth Fleet. He’d seen the fire in their eyes when the Lost Fleet descended upon Deneb, the lines people like Captain Lewis and Admiral Reyes were willing to cross to defeat them.

“Do you think they had a hand in this?” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven asked, returning to the actual topic at hand. After three decades, had they once more unleashed this virus on the Alpha Quadrant? After the return of the Lost Fleet, and after the machinations of Frontier Day, anything was possible.

“Do I think the Dominion unleashed it on Archanis Station, here and now? No, almost certainly not,” Commander Henderson shook his head. “In the end, they came to our aid in Deneb, and while changelings participated in Frontier Day, all indications suggest those changelings were operating beyond the Great Link.”

“They say the Dominion thinks in terms of centuries and millennia, that they play the long game,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven cautioned. “We had them cornered in the seventies, but is it possible they surrendered then simply to buy themselves time to regroup and move again?”

“That is certainly possible,” Commander Henderson agreed. “But if they were playing the long game, they wouldn’t start here with this. The Archanis Sector is too irrelevant and too far removed for a virus unleashed here to spread to consequential portions of the galaxy. This virus is a tool of terror, a weapon meant to extinguish all life on a station, a world or across a small region of space, but it’s not the sort of thing that ends all of civilization.”

“Then why’d they even make it?”

“Instead of committing a fleet to capture a world, you just send one changeling armed with this stuff,” Commander Henderson suggested, recalling the devastation he’d seen first hand when they responded to exactly such a place. “In the aftermath too, you don’t have to rebuild. It kills all the people, but it leaves all the infrastructure.”

“Why not design it with a longer incubation period, to give it more time to spread before it kills its host?” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven asked. If he put himself in their place, that’s what he would have done.

“Our theory was that this was all they could devise at the time,” Commander Henderson explained. “A consequence of our diversity, the Federation is not as easy to target for them as they were for us. We only had to target one species. They had to target hundreds.”

“So our diversity saved us?”

“Either that, or they simply weren’t as evil as we were.”

“Well, that’s a terrifying thought,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven shivered. It was crazy to think that the Federation had concocted something as sinister as what they were now staring at. “But if you don’t think the Dominion was involved, then how did this thing end up here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” shrugged Commander Henderson, not because he didn’t have any ideas, but rather because he had far too many. Could it be a rogue Changeling that’d eluded them after Frontier Day? Possibly. How about a criminal organization that’d come into possession of it as a result of all the burned out hulls that littered the Deneb Sector? Equally possible. Or could it even have been stolen from one of their labs? Wouldn’t be the first time. “Frankly, though, that’s someone else’s problem to sort out. Right now, we’ve got a more pressing one. We need to figure out how to stop this thing. What’ve you got so far?”

“To be honest, I can’t make heads or tails of it because all the samples we’ve been sent are so dramatically divergent,” Lieutenant Commander Verhoeven admitted. “The only thing consistent is the autoimmune presentations that all variations trigger. The receptors, the enzymes, and the capsids from each sample are too varied to design something that’d target them all.”

Commander Henderson was unsurprised. “Its rate of mutation is what eluded us during the war too. We could never figure out how to fight it because, by the time you design a payload for one person, it won’t work for the next.” And sadly, the person it was designed for was always dead before they could manufacture it.

“Then we just need to catch it at the source.”

Commander Henderson nodded.

“But we can’t detect it before they are symptomatic.”

“And therein lies the problem,” Commander Henderson sighed. “We can’t find the damn thing when it’s at such trace quantities in their system, and by the time it takes hold, it’s too divergent from the primordial strain to be useful for a generalized antiviral payload.”