Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [83]
They headed for sickbay. Picard had already heard so many baffling things in one conversation that he decided to just let it drop. When they came into sickbay, Picard found it slightly different from the one aboard his own ship. The color scheme was different, darker, as most things were, so that the feeling of space and airiness in the sickbay on his own Enterprise was missing: this one felt smaller. The diagnostic beds were a bit closer together, the ceiling a bit lower. “Where do you want me?” he said.
“Right where I’ve got you,” Beverly said, flashing him a small smile with more sheer wickedness about it than he had seen in anyone else’s face since he got here. “All I need is a protoplaser. Just sit down where you like.” She went to fetch the instrument.
Picard wandered around for a few moments, looking at the place, the diagnostic panels, the cabinets—and then he froze as his eye fell on one in particular. Everything fell into place.
He remembered looking at that cabinet back on his own Enterprise, and saying to Beverly, “This needs much better security—I want multiple authorizations required before …”
But that had plainly not happened here. It was open: it was unlocked. He slid one clear facing aside, reached in, and took the small container and the wafer that lay beside it, slipped them down into his tunic, and shut the cabinet again smoothly. He was wandering around again in the middle of sickbay before Beverly came back.
“Come on, sit down,” she said. “I have other things to do today.”
He sat. She ran the protoplaser along his jawline, and he felt the usual tingle as the severed nerves were reknit and complained about it, as skin sealed over and the derma rewove itself. She turned away, and he sat there rubbing his skin in the usual futile attempts to deal with the itch, which wouldn’t go away for another day or so.
“You’re very lucky it wasn’t any deeper than that,” she said. “You would have had a very amateur tracheotomy: that knife grazed right past the cricoid cartilage. Now how are you feeling otherwise?”
“The stun?” He shook his head. “A bit of a headache … the usual.”
“Here.” She reached into another cabinet, came up with a spray hypo. Such was the level of his paranoia at this point that it was all Picard could do to hold himself still and let her administer it. He remembered what else had come out of one of her spray hypos, and poor Stewart, lying sweating and delirious in his sickbay, while this woman’s counterpart looked at him and said, “What kind of doctor …”
“There,” she said. “It’s Aerosal.” As usual, the headache began clearing itself away instantly.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, getting up.
Crusher looked at him sideways, with a small smile. “My, aren’t we formal today. I’ll see you later.”
That begged the question of where, but he let it be. He would have to go back to the bridge now, he supposed: there was really no excuse for him to go back to his quarters immediately. He was changed, he was “put right,” as Beverly had put it. He desperately wanted to get back to that mission report; and now, considering what he had in his tunic, there was other business as well. …
But for the moment, it would be well if he was seen around and about. “Come on, Mr. Barclay,” he said at the door to sickbay, “let’s see what’s going on around here.”
They started off down the hall … and all his good intentions were abruptly derailed by the sound of the scream from down the corridor. He knew that scream: he had been within three feet of it, not long ago. And this time it was much worse.
“Come on,” he said, and headed down the hall. Barclay followed, looking like a man who expects to see something he’ll appreciate.
Around the curve of the corridor from the turbolift was the source of the sound. It was a bay opening off the corridor, not too far away from sickbay. At first Picard wondered why it wasn’t closed off if this kind of sound came out of it on a regular basis. But then he realized why. Others