Flashback - Diane Carey [3]
Torres stepped forward. "Captain, I recommend we use the Bussard collectors to gather the sirillium. They'll cut through that nebula like an ice cream scoop."
Gazing at the screen, Helmsman Tom Paris frowned in his pedestrian way. He was the only one
who balked at the temptation of sirillium. "I'm reading a lot of plasmatic turbulence in there. It could be a bumpy ride."
Janeway forced herself to give that her attention for the moment. "Can you modify the shields to compensate?"
An automatic, normal question. Instantly she realized that the person who would be answering that wouldn't be Paris, but Tuvok.
When he didn't answer, everybody turned to look at him. Janeway realized she'd blown his cover.
"Tuvok?" She turned to face him. "Tuvok!"
His lips were parted, his dark skin pasty, and there was confusion in his eyes. Terrible confusion, laced with fear-Janeway knew that look. She'd seen it in the mirror. But never from Tuvok.
No, there was more. He looked ill.
Chakotay moved to Janeway's side and looked at Tuvok.
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" he asked.
A tremor racked Tuvok's body. A glaze of perspiration struggled to the surface-witness to the stress he was under, because Vulcans rarely reached a point of physical stress enough to make them sweat visibly.
"I ... do not know," he responded. "I am experiencing dizziness . . . and disorientation ..."
Unable to clarify what he was feeling, Tuvok seemed embarrassed that he couldn't provide any answers.
He struggled for a few more seconds, then requested, "Permission to go to sickbay."
Janeway almost reached out to him, but held back "Granted."
She almost ordered an escort for him, but knew that would be impolite, though probably prudent. He wanted to get away from their prying eyes, she knew.
She made herself hold back until Tuvok maneuvered stiffly, shakily, toward the turbolift.
The lift would do most of the work. Janeway found herself ticking off the actual number of physical steps Tuvok would have to take from the lift door to the door of sickbay. In her mind she walked every step with him. An ill Vulcan ... no good.
"What was that all about?" Chakotay asked.
"Mr. Kim," Janeway said, turning. "Contact Kes in the sickbay and have her confirm when Tuvok arrives. I want to make sure he gets there all right."
"Yes, Captain," the young man said, but his hand was already on his comm panel.
Janeway was grateful for that, and heartened. They were beginning to really act like a bridge crew, anticipating each other's thoughts. That could only be good in the long run.
The long, long run.
"Very well," she said as if in agreement with herself.
Janeway stepped closer to the forward viewscreen, until she could feel the blue cast of the gaseous nebula coloring her cheeks.
"Mr. Paris, plot us a course into that nebula, right through the highest concentrations of sirillium," she
said. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Shields up."
Lieutenant Tuvok clung to the side of the moving turbolift as if riding one of those carnival structures on some hedonistic planet, the kind upon which life-forms allowed themselves to be yanked about and driven at terrific speed until nausea arrived.
He didn't see the attraction. At the moment, even riding the lift was sickening.
"Help me. . ."
He snapped his head back and bumped the wall of the lift. He looked around-not his own voice. No one was here-
A female voice. Young. A child.
There was no child aboard this ship. Yet he knew he had heard a voice just now. The certainty, though, gave him no ease.
Anxiety crushed upward inside him-a terrible physical thing, as real as the nausea.
"Help me!"
He stared at the turbolift doors before him, at the straight seam where the two doors met, but the clear image began to blur before his eyes. Fighting for control with the fingernails of his mind as if clinging to a sheer rock wall-
Sheer rock wall. . .
Rock.
He saw his own hand out before him, but it was an image from years upon years ago. His childhood.