Chapter Text
A faint wind kicked up scores of copper earth and carried with it the tinge of rot. It was inescapable even when the air was still, but somehow worsened with each passing breeze. Jim pointedly avoided looking to his right, where hundreds of bodies lay decomposing in a steel morgue. Pigs. They were piled atop each other, crowded further than even their pens would call for, as though clinging together in their empty shells. Impatiently, Jim thumbed at the fabric of his hazmat suit; in place of a greeting, a planetside representative was to arrive with a week's worth of medical records documenting the illness that had eaten through the colony. Ten minutes had passed with only the noise of distant animals and machinery to humor them. McCoy's silence beside Jim was unsettling, and he longed for something to draw his attention away from what lay beside them- or at least the smell.
The representative finally emerged from the doorway before them, and Jim could hear Bones let out a breath. Scuffing along the dirt, he came to a stop mere feet from the landing party. A brittle man, he introduced himself as a Mr. Roy Taney while slipping a memory chip to McCoy.
"Lucky enough you've got me to talk to, Frank went down with it yesterday," he wiped a heavy hand across his forehead.
Jim didn't ask about what Taney meant by "went down"; McCoy and ensign Richards- observing on behalf of the lab's molecular division- would be escorted to survey the symptoms soon enough, and from the scent of their surroundings, Jim had a hunch.
The springing up of an outbreak couldn't be considered a surprise. Cyprus Beta was a Terran colony dealing solely in livestock, butchery, and distribution to neighboring starbases. Visible even from orbit, a crude expanse of warehouses marred the surface, great steel tectonics shifting beneath the rhythm of organized slaughter. What was harrowing, though, was the disease's apparent severity.
Taney began a rambling anecdote of what he'd witnessed over the past week- "some damned flu" gripping almost the entire sparse population of Cyprus in the wake of the "pig debacle"- but as he spoke, Jim felt his own stare drawn back to the scene just out of his peripheral. Perhaps the flicker of an eye would appease the tension in his chest. Perhaps two... No, it and the sense of rot remained.
After Taney recalled what he could up to the present, Jim spoke, "I assure you, Mr. Taney, that the Federation- and through it the Enterprise- will invest all we are able into getting Cyprus back on its feet." He wasn't permitted to mention that the Enterprise was deployed out of proximate necessity to survey risk, nor that she was not equipped to carry out any sort of large scale immunization. He was permitted simply to smile through the plastic film of the hazmat.
Taney's expression remained stagnant, but he nodded, and after a pause, "You wanna see a fella gone down tuesday, or one from yesterday?"
After a pat on Jim's shoulder, McCoy was led with Richards in-step towards the jutting grey mass ahead.
For a handful of minutes, Jim stood alone, a plastic silhouette against the waning cobalt sky.
"Scotty, one to beam up." He was eager for the inevitable blink of nothingness while his atoms made their procession back to the Enterprise.