Title: Make Free With Meddle
Author: Jewels (fanfic (at) bjewelled.co.uk)
Written for: proleptic_fancy
Archive: Ask me first if you want to archive it.
Word Count: ~2,220
Summary: Agent Daniels on the Enterprise, pre-Cold Front, with emphasis on him fitting in as a character and not a plot device. Not entirely sure I managed, but I tried. Hopefully it's liked.

**

It was the low voiced muttering that gave it away. The man who was currently going by the name of "Crewman Daniels", of no first name of consequence, had always marvelled slightly at this peculiarly Human method of subterfuge. In a noisy environment such as the mess hall late at night, one table being particularly quite was simply suspicious.

One advantage of his Steward’s position, a big part of why he’d chosen to assume the roll upon his transition to the dawn of Humanity’s interstellar travels, was that people tended to ignore him. It was not out of any sort of rudeness, or viewing his position as inferior, but people just tended not to notice people who moved around quietly, making their lives easier. It meant that it was easier to drift closer to the table, under the guise of picking up discarded plates, and to eavesdrop on the conversation.

"So there’s really no news?" Hoshi Sato’s voice was the first to reach his ears. She was sitting at the table with Lieutenant Reed and Ensign Mayweather, and they all leaned in towards each other in a conspiratorial fashion.

"No," Reed said. He had a piece of lettuce speared on his fork, but had made no move to actually eating it.

"The Captain obviously wants to keep it quite from the rest of the crew," Mayweather started, dubiously, but Reed cut him off with a quick shake of the head.

"It’s not that he’s not telling," Reed corrected, "But Doctor Phlox genuinely doesn’t seem to have anything new to say. He seemed somewhat… distressed at not being able to tell what’s happening."

"He shouldn’t blame himself," Hoshi murmured, and sighed sadly, "It’s not his fault Commander Tucker might…" She broke off, guilty, and picked at her food.

Daniels abruptly straightened. He’d heard enough. He took the plates in his hands away from the table, into the kitchens and, after depositing the plates next to the sinks and nodding at Chef, ducked into a storage cupboard, taking with him a small paring knife that he’d surreptitiously picked up off the countertops as he walked.

Once out of sight of anyone else, he took the knife and, without flinching, cut deeply into the palm of his left hand.

**

Moira Murray, one of the other stewards, had nearly fainted upon seeing the blood from the ‘accidental’ injury that Daniels had sustained. Chef had merely clucked a tongue and dug out the kitchen’s first aid kit, handing out padding and gauze before sending Daniels off to sickbay to be treated.

Daniels didn’t need any persuasion to go, since that had been his goal in the first place. But he made sure to stop off at his quarters on the way.

He concentrated on looking concerned over the bloodied mess his hand had become, and pretended not to notice the way that Doctor Phlox jumped, startled, when he entered sickbay. Phlox had been standing over a bed, and it didn’t take a genius to work out who it was that was lying there, not when one got a glimpse of the blonde hair. Commander Tucker was pale, insensate, and, judging from Phlox’s manner, in a very bad condition indeed.

Still, Phlox, to give him credit, attempted nonchalance. "Ah, Crewman," he said, forcing cheer into his voice. "What can I do for you?"

Daniels held up his hand. He still had the gauze and padding passed against his palm, but, by now, they were soaked through with bright red, and there was the distinct smell of blood. "An accident in the kitchen, I’m afraid," he said.

"Ah, well, sit down. Let’s take a look at you." Phlox gestured for Daniels to take a seat on another bed, prising the gauze away from the wound carefully. "Oh my. That is nasty, isn’t it? Looks clean though. Give me a moment and a dermal regenerator, and we’ll have you right as rain in no time."

He started to turn away, but Daniels stopped him with a touch of his uninjured hand on his arm. "Is Commander Tucker alright?"

Phlox smiled that broad smile of his. To most of the crew, unused to Denobulan microgestures, would have been fooled by it. Daniels was not. "Oh, he’s fine," he said, sounding unconcerned. "Just picked up a bug from the planet we last surveyed. Nothing to worry about, I assure you."

Daniels smiled, as if still worried, but mostly reassured. "That’s good to hear."

He cast a glance over towards the bed, where Tucker lay, in a medical gown and covered with a thin sheet, pale and somehow smaller than usual, and tried not to frown.

**

The skin on his hand was still tender, but it didn’t preclude Daniels returning to duty after Phlox had finished healing his injuries which were, the Doctor assured him, "merely superficial". He finished out his shift, cleaning, preparing basic food for Chef, taking out plates, bringing back empty plates, and then repeating the whole series of events. The whole time he worked, however, part of his mind was resting on the problem in sickbay, or rather, on the individual in sickbay.

He was relieved that his roommate ("Call me Dave, man") was out at his shift in the Armoury, meaning that Daniels could work undisturbed. He carefully sealed the entrance to his quarters, and fished around in his locker until he found a small device, barely larger than his thumbnail, which he set on the desk and tapped twice.

After a moment, there was an almost inaudible click, and a holo-interface sprang into existence over the desk. The device was much smaller than the temporal observatory he’d brought with him, and had only one purpose, to interface with remote-access nanites. The same nanites he’d smeared over Doctor Phlox’s sleeve when he’d touched the Denobulan’s arm in sickbay.

They weren’t very complicated machines, with limited autonomy, but they were excellently adaptable. Their programming had been done, he’d been told, by Fountain Corp., the Exocomp company that produced some of his era’s most stunning AI designs. He’d programmed them to interface with Phlox’s equipment and piggyback the readings to Daniels’ system, and, if possible, to perform a sub-cellular diagnosis on Tucker’s body, if they came into contact with it. There were two sets of readings awaiting him when he logged in, his instructions having been apparently carried out to the letter.

It took only a moment to realise what was going on, and, when he did, Daniels sat back heavily in his chair, disturbed. His equipment had scanned Tucker’s body and matched the symptoms and scan results up with a database entry. Even if he hadn’t had the mechanical aid, the virus that flooded Tucker’s body was distinctive and immediately recognisable.

It was Choriocytosis, a virus that affected the ability of blood cells to carry oxygen to the major organs. Without treatment, the patient tended to die when the organs failed, and if the collapse in the functioning of their heart or lungs didn’t get them first, brain death usually did. By Daniels time, it was an easily curable disease, requiring a course of Strobolin-B, easily synthesised, and the victim would be up and about in no time at all.

The problem was Choriocytosis wouldn’t be discovered for another fifteen years, and a cure wouldn’t be found for another ten years after that. In Phlox’s scan there was no sign of the virus. The resolution wasn’t fine enough, and the Doctor himself didn’t know what to look for. If he was fortunate, he might find evidence of viral infection of some sort, but beyond that, it was hopeless. Tucker had contracted a lethal infection nearly thirty years before there would be any hope for a cure.

**

It had been easy for Daniels to get Phlox out of sickbay. All he’d had to do was add a couple of helpful nanites to Crewman Henderson’s dinner, and suddenly she had a full-blown case of food poisoning. Rather than drag her to sickbay when she was so unhappy about moving, Phlox had kindly agreed to go and give her the appropriate medication in the comfort of her own quarters. That left sickbay empty, except for its one, ailing occupant, who didn’t so much as open his eyes when Daniels walked in.

He carried with him an anachronistic hypospray that wouldn’t be invented for centuries. It would leave no injection marker, and would be painless and efficient. He’d replicated it, and the Strobolin-B inside it, from a small portable replicator he’d brought with him. It was easily made. All the replicator needed was raw material to process (handily provided in the form of Call-Me-Dave’s discarded shirts) and sufficient power (courtesy of 31st century power cells), and Daniels had a small innocuous item that could so easily change the course of history.

That was, after all, his plan.

Daniels looked down at Tucker thoughtfully, coming to a halt by the man’s bedside. He was sweating slightly, and Daniels realised that his pallor was due to the fact that his blood was simply not carrying enough oxygen. There was a vast array of drugs listed on his chart, easily visible on the nearest display panel if one knew how to call it up, that showed how desperately Phlox was working to save Tucker’s life. Nothing was helping, and only the fact that Tucker seemed stable for the moment had allowed Phlox to leave the room, and his research.

"You know," he said, conversationally, "When I was training to become a free agent in this charming little ‘Temporal Cold War’, the woman – well, she’s not really a woman, but that’s as close a description as you can get, I suppose – who taught me said something I remember even now. She said, ‘Non-intereference directives are for Starfleet officers and people who don’t know any better. You meddle. You meddle and you interfere, and you tie the timeline six ways from Thursday if it gets you what you need. Civilisations are like sneezes on the face of the Universe, quickly over with and easily wiped away. And since every other rat bastard out there is trying to wipe out civilisation, you might as well play as dirty as they do’."

He paused and tilted his head. "She always did have a way with words." He pressed the hypospray against Tucker’s neck, feeling the small vibration that indicated the drug had been successfully delivered, and slipped the hypo into a pocket. He’d dispose of it later. "I was rather wondering how you picked up Choriocytosis, given that it shouldn’t develop until after first contact with the Ginsal, and the mutation of an otherwise harmless virus. So I went back to the planet you were surveying. Don’t worry, I went while I was off-shift. No one missed me. Turns out someone left a bioweapon delivery mechanism behind. You were targeted by someone rather unscrupulous with access to a historical database containing the ship’s course history. Imagine that. Just as well you’ll never know really. You wouldn’t want to develop rampant paranoia about every new world."

Daniels smiled slightly. "Consider it a brief thank you for everything you’re going to do in the future," he said, and patted Tucker’s shoulder gently.

He heard the doors open, and stepped away from the bed just in time as Phlox returned from his house call, frowning to see Daniels inside sickbay. "Crewman?" he asked, pointedly.

Daniels held up his hand, and pulled a face. "It itches. Is it supposed to itch this much?"

Phlox sighed in a put upon fashion, and Daniels silently endured a chastisement about the dangers of hypochondria. It didn’t last long in any regard, as, just as Phlox seemed about ready to kick him out of sickbay, Tucker moaned, and twitched, clearly coming around.

Phlox immediately forgot about Daniels’s presence, and hurried to the Commander’s bedside. Daniels took the opportunity to discreetly withdraw.

**

Three days later, looking a little worse-for-wear, Tucker was in the mess hall, in civilian clothes and looking tired, but well. Daniels decided to indulge his sentimental side, and brought a piece of the Pecan Pie that Chef had tucked away in the refrigeration units. He smiled as he set the plate before Tucker and said,

"I hear you’ve not been too well, recently, sir."

Tucker smiled, a cheerful smile that made him look less wan. "Oh, it’s nothing. Doctor Phlox says he doesn’t even know what happened. I just picked up some bug on the planet, took my system a while to fight it off."

"Well," Daniels said, "Glad to have you back with us. The Enterprise wouldn’t be the same without you."

"Flatterer," Tucker said, grinning, taking up his fork and cutting a piece out of the pie. "You’re just glad you’ve got another chance to persuade me to give you my mother’s spiced catfish recipe."

Daniels smiled, and sat down opposite Tucker. "Well, I do one day hope to rise up and take Chef’s place."

Tucker laughed and started in on a series of comments regarding Daniels having perhaps seen one-too-many old science fiction movies, and Daniels didn’t have to hide the smile on his face because, really, interfering with the Universe and the Timeline really did work out for the best.

** End **