Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here.

"How does it look?" Dina asked, straightening briefly before returning to work harvesting tomatoes.

"Not too bad." Dean worked alongside her. They were slightly apart from the other harvesters so they could speak more freely. Yes, most crops were harvested by machine these days, but some varietals bruised easily, and a sizable portion of the population liked to get out and work with their hands periodically as a semi-vacation. "If you mean, do we know what diseases the vaccine's meant to fight. Some of them are Earth-standard from the time of Exodus, and we have to assume the Earthlings made progress on those. The others are of the close-relative variety – it looks like Chinapox and probably was derived from it, but isn't quite Chinapox. That kind of thing. Still vicious, though." He picked a small tomato and popped it in his mouth, looking upward as he mulled over the flavor.

Dina thought about Dean's statement. "All right. We have vaccines and we have a hint as to what the disease is." Time for her to share her own information. "We don’t have anything yet from Lynn as to where the 'bugs' themselves are kept. She claims she handed them off to Tomo and that was the last she saw of them. Unfortunately, without resorting to harsher interrogation techniques, that's all she's saying. But I think she's telling the truth – her story hasn't changed in any detail, even after a week."

"She probably is telling the truth," Dean replied. "She didn't hesitate to admit she made the stuff in the first place. I gather Tomo's belongings and quarters were examined?"

"Yes, although after all these years, the 'bugs' have had a long time to be hidden. It's probably a hidden-in-plain-sight problem; we just don't know where they might be."

Dean hefted his tomato basket. "Think I've got enough here. And I think you have some ideas where the 'bugs' are." He looked at Dina from under the rim of his straw hat.

She thought the hat helped him, given how many cowlicks it covered up. "Well, that is true – they're probably chilled or on ice or otherwise kept in stasis until use. Lynn said as much, that when Tomo took them, they couldn't just exist at room temperature. But that was the last she saw of them. If he had someone else work on them, maybe turn them into a shelf-stable powder form, or an aerosol, anything more easily stored and transported – well, that's starting to play what-if," she stopped herself. "Back to you: how lethal is the vaccine to Earthlings?"

With full baskets, they began walking to the edge of the field. "If we had actual Earthlings, we'd know," Dean said with a wry grin. "Perhaps fortunately, we've got engineered rodents, and I've got some people warming up engineered pig embryos, the ones that are supposed to be a close match to Earth-humans. The pigs'll help confirm or deny the mouse and rat results."

"Which are?"

"That even the vaccine is deadly to Earth-humans. We're engineered to be damn healthy, and this proves it. The rodents are dying within hours of the vaccine. Now, maybe it's just 'cause they're mice and rats, but they're supposed to be as close a match to Earth-human as can be. That's why I want the pigs tested. We're burning the carcasses," he added, and then joked, "and the whole thing's done in hermetically sealed jars."

Dina didn't laugh. "I don't like it. We've got to get that vaccine safe enough to force it on the first Earthlings we capture. Last thing we need is to have them die from exposure to us or the vaccine or the diseases." She shook her head angrily. "Lynn really opened a can of worms with this one."

"At least she developed a vaccine," Dean said mildly. "What bothers me is that she felt the need to do that on her own, years after she handed her work to Tomo. Why didn't he see a need to order a vaccine for diseases that could potentially wipe us out?"

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com