Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [39]
“I would estimate some five hours,” Data said, “assuming he was able to get to sleep.”
“Give him another hour,” Riker said. “Try to get another scan if you can. Then page him.”
“Affirmative.”
Beverly Crusher was sitting wearily at her desk, cleaning up some backed-up work—the evaluation of the anomalous members of a group of routine tissue serologies—when a voice said out of the air, “Ryder to Dr. Crusher.”
She touched her badge absently. “Yes, Brendan, what is it?”
“Doctor, I think we’d better get Stewart back to sickbay.”
“Why?” she said, sitting up straighter. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Well, he was asleep, and I thought his breathing started to sound kind of funny. So I woke him up—or tried to; he wouldn’t wake up, not all the way. He’s lying here looking groggy, and he doesn’t seem able to speak.”
“Bring him straight down!” Beverly said, getting up and heading out of her office. Somehow she found that this occurrence didn’t surprise her at all: she had had one of those edgy feelings all this evening, the sense that something was going to go wrong, or more wrong than it had gone to date. “Bob,” she said to her late-shift nurse, “is Three available again? Pull up Stewart’s readings on it, I want them for a baseline.”
“He’s coming back?” Lieutenant Rawlings said, and moved to the bed. As if in answer the sickbay doors opened and in came Ryder and Detaith, in their haste not even having bothered to break out a floater, but carrying Stewart between them.
They put him hurriedly but carefully on the diagnostic bed, and Beverly moved in, glancing at the baseline readings, then watching them change. Stewart’s temperature was pushing thirty-nine centigrade, he was pale and clammy with perspiration, his breathing was stertorous enough so that the rasp of it going in and out was audible, and though his eyes were partly open and the pupils were reactive, Stewart was plainly stuporous.
She waved the medipheral over him, watching the readout over the bed. Infection, she thought, but where the hell from? The symptoms looked almost like one of the dreadful old respiratories such as diphtheria or typhus. Even now, such were not wiped out right across known space. Old stocks of one pathogen or another would lie dormant for years or mutate into drug-resistant forms and have to be beaten down all over again.
Beverly swallowed as the diagnostic bed reported the patient’s blood to be teeming with viral organisms. They weren’t there four hours ago! she thought in angry protest, but her anger was doing her patient no good. For the moment, symptomatic treatment was in order, then detailed analysis of the virus or viroid.
Bob had come up beside her with loaded hypos. “Aerosal?”
She nodded, glancing at the hypo he held out. “Double that dosage; I want his temp down fast. Then a broad-spectrum antiviral.” Bob held out a second hypo, loaded with Scopalovir this time. “Right,” she said, “and beam a blood sample out of him, and have Helen analyze that virus and start tailoring antibodies. Then get the immune stimulator on him, too, and start selective fluid transport out of that right lung—it’s congested worse than the other. I’ll be right back.”
She stepped into her office, waiting for the door to close, and touched her badge. “Sickbay to Riker.”
“Riker. What’s up, Doctor?”
“Stewart’s temperature—and a lot of other things are wrong, too. The man’s halfway to congestive heart failure. He’s full of something viral.”
“Life-threatening?”
“I believe so.”
“Contagious?”
“Unknown, but somehow I doubt it.” Her mouth set grim. “Isn’t this about the time his Enterprise was supposed to “pick him up”?”
There was a brief silence.
“Damn,” Riker said.
“My thought exactly. Is the captain available? He ought to be informed.”
“He’s just awake now. He was expecting to be on the bridge in about twenty minutes, he said.”
“Better ask him to come down here, then, after you’ve briefed him. This is going to be touch and go.”
“Will do. Ou.”
Beverly went back outside and plunged into the fight for Stewart’s life.
Half an hour later, Beverly