Flashback - Diane Carey [48]
She gestured at the two mind-melded people and the chittering alarms flashing on the cortical monitors.
"Something's happening inside the meld," the Doctor told her. "There's terrible degradation occurring."
"Why can't I feel it? Why was I let go from the connection?"
The Doctor shook his head. "There's no way to know that. Tuvok's mind may be shutting down
different places in his brain, attempting to regain control. You may have been released, but there's no way to tell when or whether you'll be engulfed again."
Troubled, Kes hurried to Tuvok and the captain, frustrated that she couldn't just reach out and touch them, shake them out of the terrible visions.
Suddenly the alarm changed pitch, and the brain patterns on the screens started fluxing.
"What's happening?" she asked.
She wished she had the authority to turn off the terrible alarms ringing from the two monitors and the erratic brain patterns snowing on the monitors-how disturbing!
Mr. Tuvok and the captain were sitting together, facing each other, staring and frozen as if someone had sprayed them with fixative.
The Doctor rushed to the two subjects, and Kes held her breath.
"Their memory engrams are destabilizing," he said with a touch of mystery. Then he frowned and tried to read the panicked information on the monitors. "Something must be going wrong with the mind-meld."
He scowled again at a thing he didn't really understand, aggravated possibly because he himself was a computer generation and at his core was guided by the sense and numbers of a machine that believed in concrete answers.
There was nothing, nothing, and nothing concrete about the Vulcan mind-meld.
"I'm going to bring them out of it," he decided.
He seemed relieved that medical necessity now removed the choice from himself, or Kes, or even Chakotay.
He tapped some controls on a panel Kes had long ago been told never to touch. She couldn't help a moment of fascination and awe at her new chosen career-medical science-and she realized there was still so much she had yet to learn. In her short life, would she have time to learn it all?
Did anyone? Even creatures whose life spans were longer than nine years?
Even the Doctor here, who was in essence a compilation of all doctors and all knowledge where this ship came from, was learning new things by the day.
Kes watched-the Doctor was frowning again. She came around and looked at the monitors. "It's not working."
"Their neural patterns appear to be locked together. I can't break the meld."
He checked another reading, genuinely frustrated by his inability to stop what was happening.
"The damage to Tuvok's synaptic pathways is accelerating. At this rate, he'll be brain-dead within twenty minutes." He tapped a single activator, then urgently added, "Get me the cortical stimulator!"
CHAPTER 14
"PARIS! TOM! WAKE UP. WE'RE IN TROUBLE."
"My head . . ."
"The containment system is agitated! We've got eruptions of sirillium deposits all around us for more than eighty kilometers! We can't clear it unless you get up and help me!"
"My shoulder ... am I bleeding?"
"Yes, you're bleeding. You fell into an open conduit cover. You've got a slash across the outside of your shoulder. If we live, we'll stop it. Try to get up."
"Warm and tender as ever, B'Elanna. I can always count on-oh, my ribs!"
"Don't push your luck. Voyager! Do you read us? Voyager, come in!"
Torres pushed away from Paris, who looked a lot worse than he sounded, and punched the communi-
cation's surge controls. They had to communicate if they were going to get out, and they had to have power if they were going to communicate.
Every few seconds a new scatter of explosions outside bumped the shuttle into a new surge pattern, and it shook as if running on a cracked track.
"The sirillium's been ignited." Torres gasped, choking on coolant leakage and compromised atmospheric integrity. "Voyager, why did you fire on us?"
She stumbled back to Paris and picked at the containment tank controls