Flashback - Diane Carey [14]
"I've agreed," the Doctor clipped. "But I'm not happy about it."
CHAPTER
6
"TUVOK!"
Chakotay automatically called out the lieutenant commander's name, but there was no shaking him out of what was happening to him. His eyes had gone blank, then filled with that horror they'd seen yesterday.
"Watch his head!" Chakotay grabbed for him and managed to shove Tuvok sideways enough that he didn't get brained on the console directly behind him. Together they went down in a heap, and Chakotay shoved himself up instantly.
"Not again!" B'Elanna Torres dropped to her knees beside the collapsed officer.
Chakotay knelt there too and made sure Tuvok had a pulse. The little cortical monitor was beeping and chirping desperately. Something disruptive was
going on in Tuvok's mind, and there was no way to stop it.
He knew he wouldn't have to notify sickbay-the cortical monitor was already doing that-but the Doctor was a computer projection and couldn't come to Tuvok. Tuvok would have to be taken there for treatment.
"Kes might come now," Torres said, as if reading his mind.
Harry Kim stood over them, unsure of what he could do. "But he still needs to be treated in sickbay. I don't think Kes should be tampering with him, should she? After all, he's . . ."
"I know what he is," Chakotay said. "We should notify the captain. She's pretty protective of Tuvok."
He tapped his commbadge. "Chakotay to Janeway."
The captain answered so quickly it seemed she was expecting this.
Of course, she was probably expecting the report on the nebula.
"Janeway here."
"Captain, Mr. Tuvok's collapsed again. And he was looking at the nebula at the time, just like yesterday. It's got to have something to do with this."
"Something, but what? The color, the intensity, some field we're not reading? I don't like this."
"Agreed."
"I'm glad, but what's the report on that nebula? Where are you? Is Mr. Kim there with you?"
"Yes, we're in main engineering. Kim says the nebula is standard class-seventeen-"
He stopped and looked at Kim.
The young officer blinked, then spoke up. "Captain, it's class-seventeen, made of not much more than sirillium gas, dust, and ambient gamma radiation. It's just not all that unusual as nebulae go."
"Noted. Could it be emanating something that we're not picking up?"
Kim looked dismayed. "Um . . . there's nothing in there that could emanate anything. It's a very simple anomaly. In fact, the word anomaly barely fits it, now that we know what it's all about."
There was a pause of dissatisfaction from the bridge. "Understood, but keep looking. Chakotay, transport Tuvok immediately back to sickbay. I'll meet you down there."
"Aye, Captain."
"Janeway out."
Janeway would've preferred not to leave the bridge during this kind of maneuver, though this nebula they were passing through seemed relatively passive in spite of the bumps.
When she got to sickbay, the sight was disconcerting. Chakotay and the Doctor stood over Tuvok, who lay on one of the bio-beds, unconscious. Janeway was no medical specialist, but she knew enough about the medical scanner at the head of the bed to read that Tuvok was in great distress, his physical condition either severely depressed or overly stimulated. All the indicators seemed to be way up or way down.
"How is he?"
"Alive," Chakotay said.
The Doctor glowered at having the first officer put his two cents in where a medical answer was required. "H is condition is stable, considering the level of agitation he's experienced. This time, the episode was far more than just a panic attack. You can see the graphic of his brain on that monitor to your left-representations of the axons and neurons are firing with general uniformity, except in this one area. This section near his hippocampus is firing very erratically. Clearly, something is quite wrong there. If you'll bear with me, I'll go to the med lab and analyze these data. Perhaps then I can have a hypothesis for you."
The Doctor looked at each of them, then actually sighed with