Phlox

As a young man, drawn to medicine, Phlox had worried. He'd worried about making mistakes that cost lives. Faith in himself had got him as far as medical school where his training had been cold comfort. You will make mistakes that kill people, his instructors said. But you will save more than you kill, and you will kill fewer than the recruit that would take your place would. And if that's not true, then that's our fault, not yours.

And yet now, as an old man, Phlox was faced with the truth that his mistake had killed half the quadrant. He might find the hand of a higher power in the fact that he'd just proved it to himself today, the very day that Romulan forces would annex Denobula. The day he could expect to die, one way or another.

It danced before him, on the display, the software helpfully rotating it, so he could see it from all sides. A novel bioactive agent. A molecule produced by a single species of plant that grew in a remote gully on a distant, uninhabited planet, that Enterprise had stumbled across. Evolution was sometimes a strange thing.

Perhaps there was no way he could have known. No way to know the strange effect it would have on the right hemisphere of the neocortex. No way to know that Vulcans would be particularly susceptible. No way to know how the fall of Vulcan would cause a chain reaction, destabilising alpha quadrant species one after the other, with the Romulan Empire expanding in chaos's wake.

But if there was no way to know, then why did he finally isolate the agent this day? Why else would some higher power allow him to live to see the face of his unconscious enemy, but not a day longer. Surely coincidence was not so cruel.

"You are dead, my colleagues," he said, raising a glass to those long ago instructors. "There is no one left but me."

He took a sip.

"You are dead, my friends" he said, raising a glass to his shipmates from Enterprise.

He took another.

The poison would work far faster than the one displayed on his monitor.

But it would kill only one.